IX
The rain exhausted its ammunition during the night; a clear truce followed. The bright green cleanliness of leaves, the reburnished brilliance of golden-glow and flaming canna, showed the hill heartened by the hours of storm.
But there was nothing morning-minded in Pelham's soul, as he irked over the day's details at the mines. All that he had to do seemed mechanical, inconsequential; the planning had been done already—his admirable rôle was that of a cog, touching off other cogs to their diverse tasks in the vast mechanism that was disemboweling the mountain,—the mothering mountain, that had once been pal and parent to him. Less than a cog, indeed—for the other cogs held him as alien; he could not share their lives nor their thoughts, nor was he one of the final beneficiaries, no matter what the miners might think.
He knew, too, that his father was becoming as alien to him as these miners held that the son was to them. Pelham was wrapped up in the minutiæ of the mining; and this was a book in which Paul had covered only the first simple chapters. Again, the son's reading at the northern college, and the intangible outlook acquired there, opened vistas that Paul could not share; and in those matters where the two wills came into direct touch, such as marrying "where money was," and relationship with women, they were pole-distant apart. The son, in his youthful restlessness, was at outs with the whole situation; he was bored with it, as he was with the young concerns of his brothers, the chatter of Nell and Sue, and the immeasurable vapidity of Nellie Tolliver, Lane Cullom, Dorothy Meade, the whole group of Adamsville's stale, unprofitable friends, young and old. There was, of course, his mother ... and the mountain; but she was part and parcel of Paul's existence, too; and the mountain seemed strangely uncommunicative and passive, these days, as if waiting for him to make the break, to take an affirmative step needed to quicken his thinking and being.
The insipid promise of the afternoon's fête, for instance—were his days to be an unending vista of such chatter, and trivial preening and strutting of visionless girls and young men? Dorothy offered more than that; yet he was singularly at odds with himself over her. To be burnt by a fire he could not touch: to chain himself, a voluntary Tantalus, before perilous sweets just out of reach—an admirable rôle! It was in his own hands to end it; and since Paul's advice about Butler's Avenue did not condemn the thing that he shrank from in Dorothy's case, he was repelled by the remembrance that he had ever considered ending the purity that Mary had held him to.
After all, his sisters' fête would be better than that.
But when he had carefully dressed for it, and was immersed in its shallow flippancy, he reacted the other way. Lettuce sandwiches and lemonade!—Good God! Determined to dodge the rest of it, he sidled around to the garage, and sneaked out his car. When the fresh crest breeze sprayed over his face, he pressed on the accelerator, and only slowed with the turn into the road to the city.
At his arrival before the darkened Meade bungalow, two voices reached him from Dorothy's lit boudoir. His feet scraped slowly up the steps; after two thoughtful feints, he pushed the bell. There was distaste already at what lay before him; life offered no new way out.
"Turn the porch switch, Pelham," Dorothy called from above. "Read the papers.... We'll be down soon."
So she even assumed his presence!
The swinging door was pushed outward, a short while after he had balanced himself on the extreme edge of the swinging couch. A girl stepped out and walked over to him. He rose conventionally.
"I'm Jane Lauderdale," she said, in a voice of pleasing, bell-like quality. "'Thea told me to amuse you, until she's ready. You are Mr. Judson?"
As their minds clashed in preliminary conversational skirmishing, some sense of her restful loveliness came to him. It was her eyes that spoke most clearly—those lighted windows in the spirit's comely house. Jane's eyes were a deep, swimming brown, with an effect of largeness and roundness, as if she looked upon the irregular march of the hours with the unfeigned naïveté of a child—a semblance heightened by a starlike radiance of the eyes themselves and the long shielding eyelashes. They seemed less to stand off and inspect him, than to reach out and envelop him, bringing him within their substance. Despite the difference of shape, they held the same deep liquidity of his mother's eyes.
The whole face, he fancied, was that of a mother—a madonna. The live brown hair was smoothed back from a high forehead, with the simplicity of a Grecian maiden; there was just a hint of pallor in her complexion, whose whisper of lack of health was negatived by glowing cheeks and sparkling face. It was not the typically thin-visaged Italian madonna; it was this sublimated into an ampler shapeliness of feature. The voice was clear and direct, with the lingering overtones of a gong quietly tapped in still dusk. Her presence was restful, comforting, and at the same time embodied an unmistakable challenge to his own nature and worthiness.
The impression of childish naïveté, he soon found, must not be stretched too far; her vision was astonishingly clear and comprehending, with a definiteness that at times almost amounted to dogmatism.
Her mention of long-time friendship for "'Thea" gave something to inquire about. "You'll be at her table Saturday evening?"
"At the club, you mean? I hardly think so," and she smiled softly.
"Don't you dance?"
"Yes.... But not often. To be quite frank, the people one meets at the country club are rather banal ... even Dorothy's friends."
"Thank you! That's a touch. Perhaps you bridge."
"Sometimes I make a fourth; but cards are very easy to get absorbed in, to the point of obsession, don't you think?"
"I suppose so; if you take them that seriously. Are you fond of golf, or tennis?"
A charming precision was in her answers, as if they had been framed before. "Tennis suits the strenuous adolescent; golf, the bay-windowed corporation head. One is behind me; the other I pray never to become. I don't love corporations," she smiled. The smile covered her preliminary judgment; his questions were banal, almost gauche; but what could one expect of a worshiper of Dorothy?
What did the girl like, anyhow? These were sure-fire topics with all the rest Pelham knew.... Perhaps the Post, on the table nesting her arm. "Are you enjoying the latest Chambers' story? I don't think it's up to 'The Danger Mark'—though, of course, Chambers'——"
"I enjoyed part of the opening—you know, the dry-goods inventory—the lingerie part. It's informative: a Sears-Roebuck for the Broadway shops. But—beyond that!"
"What are you interested in?" Inability to pigeon-hole her among the feminine types he was used to called forth this poverty-stricken directness.
"I'm interested in what you are doing, Mr. Judson, ever since 'Thea mentioned it." Her straightforward eyes lit up for the first time.
"She's done nothing but sing your praises for the last few weeks." He rose in fatuous gracefulness to her opening.
The frank eyes measured him coolly. "What interested me was your work. You have charge of the mining at your father's place, haven't you?"
A bit dazed by the sudden shift, he told his connection with the management.
Her nod of satisfaction puzzled him. "I've always wanted to learn something of the other half of the story; I know the miners' side, from work with the United Charities. And I've been studying reports, until a sheer excess of wrath made me lay them aside."
What odd reading for a girl! "How did you happen to take that up?"
"Mrs. Anderson has me on her Labor Legislation Committee." She smiled gently, the eyelids nearing one another in unconscious grace. "I tried to interest 'Thea in it; one meeting tired her out."
He had a fleeting vision of volatile Nell or finicky Sue reading a mining report. Evidently this Miss Lauderdale was something of a person. Of course, it wasn't exactly a woman's work, unless her charm earned it as a unique prerogative.
A contented smile lengthened his lips. "We treat our miners pretty well, in this state."
"Yes, that is the general impression. I wonder if you've gone into the matter very thoroughly?" She was coolly critical; he felt a bit shriveled under her friendly gaze. "The South is backward, in some things; but it's waking up. You went to Harvard, didn't you?"
"Yale Sheff."
"Oh, that's better. I have a brother prepping at Laurenceville; he'll go to Sheff or Massachusetts Tech."
"Better, you say? Just how?"
"Yale at least talks about democracy." Her phrases were astonishingly direct, her intonations warm and enthusiastic.
"Did you go to college?" Pelham wondered.
She shrugged ever so slightly. "No; a finishing school—Ogontz. Don't mention it, please. Tell me something of your work."
Her leading questions were beginning to reveal his blundering vacuity about labor conditions on the mountain, when Dorothy fluffed out. Her sharp eyes noticed at once his sheepish interest. "Jane's been boring you with a discussion of the labor question, foreign and domestic, I'm sure! I can't convert her. She'll worm everything you know out of you in half an hour, I warn you."
Pelham agreed, a bit chagrined. "Yes.... She was just telling me what I didn't know about my men."
Jane's lips curved open into a smile, friendly and somehow approving. "You'll learn, I think."
Dorothy yawned in intimate boredom, "An apt pupil, no doubt.... I thought this was the day of the great fête, Pelham."
"It is," he smiled. "They are at this moment enjoying lemonade and lettuce sandwiches."
Dorothy looked puzzled; Jane's cheeks crinkled appreciatively.
The older woman turned to the girl with ruffled rudeness. "Stay on for supper, Jeanne?"
The other shook her head. "I must run along. Choir practice to-night," with a mischievous dimple.
"Religious all of a sudden?"
"The rector flourishes in my spiritual presence."
"How is his new reverence?"
Her mouth twisted piquantly. "Mushy.... Nice boy, though. Coming by to-morrow?"
"Between three and four."
"So long.... Good night, Mr. Mine Superintendent."
Pelham convoyed her to the steps, doubly unwilling to let her go, as he reflected on her fresh charm, and the blind alley of the other woman's amorousness. "I enjoyed our talk, Miss Lauderdale. Could the course continue?"
"I'm always glad to have a human being to talk to. I'm staying with the Andersons; the number's in the phone book."
Thoughtfully he returned to the porch, and a cretonned wicker chair, ignoring the message of the partly-occupied couch.
Inquisitive gray eyes watched him. "Do you like her?"
"Oh, so-so. She seems intelligent."
"Men never do like Jeanne," she assured him, with a complacent rippling gesture of her flounced body. "She's a dear, but too dreadfully serious. Doesn't like dancing, and all——" waving vaguely in the direction of the club.
"Tell me something about her."
"There isn't much. Jeanne—I love the French twist, don't you?—Jeanne's a queer, dear girl, Pelham; always busy with labor committees, or something as uplifting and tiresome."
"I've never heard of her, except from you. Is she kin to the Andersons?"
"Oh, no; her people are northern. She was living with an aunt in Philadelphia; tired of her, and skipped out. Another of her modern notions.... She's intelligent; but, then, brains don't marry,—they go to Congress. Or is it the other way? Anyhow, Lyman says that I have no brains." She smiled provocatively.
This time he came, in answer to her pouting, unworded bidding. He was heartily glad, as apparently eager arms gave her the desired harborage, that the other girl was by now blocks away.
A day or two later he telephoned, and on Friday evening came by the Anderson house at eight.
"I'll be down in a minute," she called from the top of the balustrade.
The Andersons were away for the month, he recalled. With a pleasant restlessness, he prowled around the cosy living-room, and finally selected a library book on the table. It was by a favorite author; but the title, "A Modern Utopia," was new to him. He was into the second chapter when she appeared.
"What a remarkable Wells book!"
She smiled at the enthusiasm. "You don't mind walking, do you?... It's stuffy inside."
"No indeed. Just a moment." He jotted a memorandum of the volume on a handy envelope back.
For all the quiet grace of her face, he noticed that Jane fitted into his stride naturally—and he was a good walker. Instinctively they turned up the hill; the height beyond reached out an irresistible invitation.
Her face drew his eyes as inevitably as the mountain drew their feet. The face had sparkled on the Meade porch; but the brisk fingering of the night breeze woke it to a positive radiance. When she turned her eyes upon him, their radiant lashes enclosed darker heavens than those above, framing two stars brighter than Vega.
"Tell me about yourself," he urged. "Dorothy said you had 'run away' from your aunt——"
"Sounds like a naughty little girl, doesn't it? It wasn't quite that bad, though."
"Think of running away to Adamsville!"
"It is an 'H' of a place——" She looked quizzically at him; his smile reassured her. "I believe in that kind of hell. But it's nothing, compared to what I left." Her lips closed decidedly.
He would not drop the subject. "Your aunt was a doctor, wasn't she? And a politician?"
"So you are determined to slice to the skeleton. Yes, she's a doctor, runs her own hospital, and as much of the rest of the city as she can. She had the running habit, Mr. Judson; and, the first few years I was with her, she ran me too ... and then ran me away." Unwilling lips locked, as if unhappy at the recollection.
"Just why?"
The words were picked carefully. "She wanted me to live as her echo—parrot her likes and dislikes, accept every limping bias as final truth. My mother was the same type." He fancied that the eyes shone more lustrously; but they were turned away. This topic, of the conflict between the girl and her parents, stirred him to a disquieting curiosity, avid for all the details, the hows and the whys; as if the answers held some clew that he sought for.
She answered the question that he refrained from asking. "Yes, she's alive; I left her, to go and live with Auntie. The thing sounds unbelievable, and ridiculous; but she wanted to keep me forever at the age of thirteen and a half. Father was dead, and she looked young; a grown daughter was something to explain away. Why, she would have kept me in knee skirts if the neighbors hadn't talked.... When she married again, I left."
"Are those the only times you ran away?" he smiled the query.
She pointed to the red scowl in the north, where some startled furnace had opened its giant eye beneath the cloudy mirror of the heavens. "Isn't it marvelous!... Did I ever run away before? I believe when I was four I got tired of home—we were living in Indiana then—packed my rag doll and the puppy into my baby-carriage, and started out.... They caught me before I had gone a block."
He watched the vacant sky. The red glare had abruptly died. "You should see the view from our crest—Crenshaw Hill.... I almost ran away, once. I got as far as the railroad station." He detailed the weeks of punishment that had preceded his attempted escape.
"Your father must be a brute!" The contagious sympathy that shook her tones moved him.
"He's really nice.... His viewpoint is old-fashioned."
"Old fashioned! It's paleolithic. No wonder you ran away."
"He figured that I was his son—accent on the 'his.' He has the idea still."
She stared moodily at the dark blankness of the mountain, then swung beside him on a slender coping at the head of a little park lost in a bend of the highland boulevard.
"That's the trouble with the whole family system," she reflected slowly. "Parents never realize that children grow up. Why not go to the other extreme, and assume that the child has an individuality from the start?"
"You like children?" Something in his thoughtful tone threw a shadow of embarrassment over both, intimate and strangely agreeable.
"Yes.... Very much."
The talk strayed gently to less personal matters. The moon-glow from a street lamp drizzling through gray-green leaves fell upon her shoulder; the smooth meeting, at the nape of her neck, between shining chestnut hair and glowing flesh caught and held his attention; he wanted to lean over and kiss it—harshly—as he would have kissed Dorothy. What would this girl do? What would she say? She did not dislike him, evidently; and he found her not only holding a deeper, more restful physical charm than the other woman, but also possessed of a mental kinship that he met for the first time in the other sex. Why, at times her impressions seemed even maturer than his own. How could his thoughts dare to link inch-deep Dorothy and this girl together!... But a kiss? No, he had done enough of casual loving; he would keep Jane's body inviolate even from the touch of his lips, until they were ready for the final mating.... Why not, if she would have him? What pitiful things, beside her, had been pert-tongued Virginia, Nellie Tolliver, and the rest! A madonna in face, a woman worthy of all life's adorations.... How astonishing was life, that had flung them together, when he might have missed this dearest hour that he had yet known!
Jane's thoughts, too, were busier than her words. He was attractive, she had at once decided, when measured beside the superficial trousered creatures, "positively not grasshoppers," that smirked their way through Adamsville society; but he was young, very young, in his ideas—his brain still swimming in the haze of third-hand opinions which his father had inherited from slave-wealthy forbears. Men cherished easy mental ruts grooved by the unprogressive centuries; pioneering paths were only for the few. Pelham Judson looked hopeful; no more. Yet there was a distinguishing, cordial charm in his courtesy; it was not all lip-service. Poor kid! With a father like Paul Judson, and a mother swathed in old prejudices like a Memphian mummy in binding cerements—how could he be expected even to see beyond his fortuitous rut? The brief age of miracles had passed. But he was a nice boy; and with a different mother.... Perhaps she could do a little mothering herself; but she must be careful not to let him take her too seriously; or take her at all, she smiled to herself. She had boasted to Dorothy that her husband must be progressive, or pliable; Pelham seemed neither.
And yet he would not make such a bad appearance. Clean looking, athletic, and the son of a Judson—he would not have to be explained away or apologized for. It would be a positive charity to keep him out of the clutches of the usual Adamsville girl, her brain a fricassee of bridge scores and dancing dates. She smiled lazily as she reflected that he would take to mothering; his curly hair begged to be smoothed and tousled. Well, she would give it a yank or two; it would serve Dorothy right.
While their words skimmed jerkily above the subjects in which they were really interested, and their thoughts weighed, appraised, and at times depreciated, more deeply, an even more underlying, more ancient set of forces were at work. Eyes talk a language that thoughts would deny; certain proximities bind closer than the unthinking iron to the insensate magnet; above and below speech and meditation, unseen selves meet, measure, and mate, dragging tardy consciousness into situations it thinks are of its planning. These calls and greetings date back of life's long blundering on the harsh land, back to the life-cradling sea: they speak with the unconscious weight of slow millenniums of mindless love. They are kin to the cord that binds the falling apple to the earth, the earth to the sun, the sun to the far starry outposts of the visible universe, and it to the invisible majesty beyond. The infinite pull of material attraction does not sleep: nor do these forces tire of their ancient tasks. Love, rooted deep in life, and born of older ties, does not cease its endless search, its tenacious intangible clasp of what it needs to round its unique need into a blent ecstasy.
There are those who deny romance to a love kin to gravitation and issue of insect matings. They are this far right, that romance is a late by-blow of the ageless creative hunger.
Pelham took Jane back conscientiously shortly after eleven. They had not mentioned the mining situation. The silent hours after their parting were full of the subtle working of those hidden forces whose power they had begun to feel, there upon the narrow coping above the little park.