VIII
"Well, young man, ready to go to work?"
"This morning, father."
Paul took up the extra slack in his belt. "Oh, we won't rush you. You'd better take the first week off and visit the Barbours. They're getting pretty old, Pelham; they'll appreciate it."
"All right, sir."
Paul stopped to examine a badly-hung gate, sagging weakly away from its post. "I'll fire that lazy Peter, if he doesn't 'tend to these hinges better. A cow could push through and eat up five hundred dollars' worth of shrubs before your mother caught on.... We'll have you meet some of the men."
They came up behind a stubby, middle-aged Irishman, loudly ordering a group of white workers who were timbering the newest mine entrances. "D'ye want the whole mountain to fall on you? Jam it under that slide rock, man."
At the father's hail he turned genially. "Mornin', Mr. Judson."
"This is the son I was telling you about. Pelham, this is Tom Hewin, who keeps things moving in the mines."
"Pleased to meet you, sir." There was a servile hump to his shoulders; a deprecating instability in his glance greeted the boy. "Hey, Jim." A youth of Pelham's age, an uncertain smile dancing from his eyes, advanced from the overalled workers. "This is my boy, sir. I'm learnin' him to be a boss miner too." Hewin's flattened thumb pointed to Pelham. "Want me to put him to work, sir?"
"He'll report next Monday."
Tom scratched a bristly head. "They'll be plenty for you to do, sir."
"How's that drain in Number 11, Tom?"
Pelham admired his father's vigorous handling of the varying questions. His own opinion was asked about one matter, as they inspected the cut-ins of the ramp cleaving Crenshaw Hill. He backed up Hewin's solution; the facile superintendent promptly flattered the young man's grasp of the problem.
As they walked back to breakfast, Paul shared a further insight into the human element of the work. "Yes, he's a good man to have there. He directed one of the Birrell-Florence mines for two years; quit in some row or other. He doesn't get along too well with his men. I don't trust him; he'll pad the rolls, and undermark the weights, every chance you give him. He'd steal from the niggers and miners, and from me as well, if I'd let him. That's one of the reasons I'll be glad to have you on the job.... He gets things done."
"What will I do, father?"
"You're to be his assistant; he'll keep you busy. Fifty a week, to begin with. When you're worth more, we'll increase it."
Pelham's mind played around the conversation all during the trip to Jackson that followed. It was not just what he had fancied, he told himself, staring at the green hump-backed hills along the road. Why should he not be head of the operations? But that could come; he must show his worth first.
There was a persistent shock of disappointment in the amount he was to receive. It was hardly respectable. His allowance since junior year had been five thousand.... Well, he could make it do.
His self-complacency returned at the grandparents'. Jimmy, who had still a year in law school, was dazzled by the Sheff product; Lil, who had rounded into ample, magnolia-like beauty, capitulated devoutly. The old people's loving pride warmed him; but its flavor cloyed. He was glad at the end of the week to return his attention to the mountain.
Hewin found the boy quick at observation, and a good listener; the contact evidently suited the Irishman immensely. Now was the chance, he decided, to solidify himself with the Judsons. Pelham became familiar with every detail of the work. He ended with a confused impression that the bustling superintendent had either done every stroke with his own battered hands, or had devised and inspired it.
"They're good workers," he concluded, marveling at the patent energy.
"They'd better be."
With such a spirit, anything was possible. It was only later that he realized that this was surface activity; that the leisurely gait of negroes and whites alike quickened only when the boss was in sight.
The first ramp lay to the north of the house, through what was still called "Coaldale the Second;" the second, on the Logan land south of the gap, was put into his especial care. He bent over blueprints and calculations, verifying what had been planned. Careless bits of figuring were corrected; he found one plot of openings contrary to all reason.
"Your number two will collide with the entry above, Mr. Hewin. Look—it ought to be opposite five, here."
Tom studied the diagram from all angles, then laid it down. "Figurin' ain't everything, Mr. Judson. You've got to know your ground. Bring along them maps."
They mounted above the level where the negroes were timing their pick strokes with a wailing improvised chant, reminiscent of cotton field spirituals.
"See that flaw? All your figgers don't take no account of it. We cut in below here, then bend in to the left. This way.... When I was with the Birrell-Florence folks, we went right in under a flaw. The dam' timbers slipped one day, an' we lost four mules, as well as half a dozen niggers. You got to know your ground."
Pelham straightened the line a trifle, corrected the figures, and the cutting went on. The third month showed a marked improvement over the second.
Gradually he noticed that, while there was a great show of deep mining with the first ramp and the delayed second one, the main vigor was bent to the easier dislodging of the outcrop.
He studied the agreements, measured the cleared areas carefully, and carried his discoveries to Paul.
The father took the matter up with Hewin. "How far have you gone to the north, past the mouth of the ramp?"
"About four hundred feet, sir."
"Measure it."
The tape showed five hundred forty.
"By the agreement, you couldn't go beyond four hundred and twenty feet, with eight ramp openings."
"Them damn' niggers must a moved the stob I put in. We won't go no further."
The outcrop-scraping continued fifty feet, before another opening was made.
World-unsettling events were happening, during the weeks when this minor dispute disturbed the serenity of relations on the mountain between owner and contractors. The same day that Pelham reported the repeated trespass on the easy outcrop, the startled papers told of the vaster trespass across the convenient miles of Belgium, which was bitterly contesting the gray-green flood of alien soldiers. The father turned from the headlines to discuss, with caustic vigor, the annoyance nearer home.
"There's no way to stop it, Pelham. They'll rob the surface, no matter what the contract reads. It's so much cheaper to get at ... lazy scoundrels! It 'ud take six years in court to settle it. Meanwhile, the mine would be locked up tighter than a barrel."
"You could get damages."
"Not a cent ... not solvent. Keep your eye on them; we'll play them along. Bad as this war promises to be, somebody's liable to need our iron. Prices must boost; the Hewin contract will hold our cost down. We won't lose."
There were few minds in Adamsville, at this time, that saw even this much connection between the remote struggle and placid home affairs.
In the spring, the third ramp was cut—half a mile to the north, beyond the crest of Crenshaw Hill, through a row of trees called the Locust Hedge. North of its base, on a wide bowl-like opening, the shacks and stockades for certain convict miners were built. Paul's bid for two hundred of the State long termers had been successful; these were isolated near the extreme end of the Crenshaw property, and kept at the deeper mining in the third series of entries.
Nearer Hillcrest, the underbrushed ridge at the foot of the higher peak was cleared, and houses were built for workers who did not live in Adamsville, or Lilydale, the negro settlement saddling the low Sand Mountains. A prong of the mountain shielded the Judson home from this shack town; otherwise the screams, shots, and general disorder around pay days would have driven away the family. "Hewintown" was the railroad's designation for the flag station below it; "Hewin's Hell Hole" was its usual title.
Here Tom Hewin brought the three hundred miners from Pennsylvania, after he had discharged several gangs who fretted under the talk of union agitators.
Pelham helped erect the larger frame houses for the commissary, the office, and the overseers' homes. Frequently he idled through the two settlements, and tried in awkward fashion to understand the personal side of the workers. They answered civilly questions about their work; when he tried to go further, they drew back, surly and distrustful. He could not understand this wall of reserve.
One weazened grouch, Hank Burns, who had been a miner for forty years, tried to account for it. "Why should they trust you, Mr. Judson? They know you think they're dogs."
"But I don't!"
"Ain't you the owner's son? And a superintendent to boot. What should you have to do with such as us?"
Pelham gave way to a gust of pique. "That's a silly way to look at it."
Hank shook his head sagely. "Silly or not, Mr. Judson, how else can they look at it? You—or your paw—hires 'em, don't he? You can fire 'em too, if you don't like their talk. I hear some of 'em say, the other day, you was snoopin' 'round to spot union men. They know better than to talk."
The other shook his head, puzzled. "You talk to me."
"I ain't got no folks I've got to keep goin'. If I'm fired, I'm fired. 'Twon't be the first time. 'N' I don't shoot off my mouth any too much, either. Your job is to keep 'em workin', an' pay 'em what you got to. Their job is to get what they can. That's all there is to it."
"The good of the mines is their good."
The old man chuckled noiselessly. "I ain't never seen it, if it is. You want what you can get, they want what they can get. You can't both have it...."
This was all Pelham could learn from him; it was as far as he could get.
Tom Hewin stayed on the job at all times. His son, Jim, every two or three months, broke loose for a half-drunk. He was too crafty to drink to the point where he lost control of himself; but he would become mean and quarrelsome. He made a habit of disappearing at these times for a couple of days.
"Jim sick again?" Pelham would ask, curious to piece out what he knew of the doings of these inferior folks.
Tom would lower at the absent son. "I used to whale his hide off for it, Mr. Judson. He's big enough to lick me now. He don't do no harm; an' I never seed him really intoxercated. He makes good money; he'll be a boss miner yet, even with this here foolin'. Booze an' women.... Every young man has to shoot off steam now an' then. They can't fool you, can they, now?" He leered in low camaraderie. "You been there yourself, eh? Don't tell me!"
Pelham was sure that he would not.
What with his work and reading, Pelham would have been content to remain a recluse on the mountain. Paul drove this out of his head at once. "Join the University Club as soon as you can; we'll make your salary two fifty a month, and you can afford the Country Club also. Circulate; it's good advertising. We'll keep the hill going somehow."
The first taste led to more; soon he was a regular part of the life at the clubs. Frequently he would knock off at four, while the other workers were still at their jobs, to clean up and whizz over the hills for a sharp match of doubles, or an energetic foursome.
He could not manage a thrill of regret at the news that the sweetheart of a few summers back, Virginia Moore, was to be married in October. There was a new crop of debutantes, and most of the girls of his college days still put themselves out to attract him. For a few months he rushed Nellie Tolliver, a brilliant hand at auction; but he tired of her stiff preoccupation with the narrow limits of gossiping small talk.
One of his sister Nell's friends, Dorothy Meade, was more to his liking. She had come from some level of Washington social life, to marry Lyman Meade, the local representative of the Interstate Power Company. Lyman went his own easy way, and she hers. Chic, with an orderly aureole of fluffy gold hair, sparkling gray eyes and a perpetual display of more of her shoulders and breast than the lax club convention permitted, her only difficulty was in repelling admirers.
Saturdays were the regular dinner nights at the Country Club; Dorothy was the final fluffy attraction that turned Pelham into an invariable attender. He annexed himself to the lively group that ringed her on these occasions, to the amusement of her gayer admirers.
"Here's Dots, poaching on the bassinet preserve!" some professional bachelor, his head innocent alike of hair and illusions, would indict.
"First childhood or second, why should I discriminate?" Her cheerful offensive routed the covetous critics.
Dorothy's young moth was at least persistent. Her attractive bungalow dominated the hilly head of a by-street near the links, and Pelham formed the habit of dropping in for Sunday suppers. She was good to her maids, preparing and serving herself the crisp salad mysteries and froth-crowned desserts.
"Can't I help some way?"
Her eyes would twinkle adorably. "Mamma's helpful boy! Here, let me put this apron on you!"
He could feel her voluble fingers whisper to him, as they shaped the knot; she would stand close before him, to see that the linen badge of utility hung evenly from his stretched shoulders. This disturbed the regularity of his heart-beats; but then, she was Lyman's wife, reflected Pelham. When the husband was present, he smiled enviously at the timid and satisfied adoration that Pelham's efforts to conceal published the more.
Despite all of his reading, Dorothy's marriage made her, in his brown adolescent eyes, wholly intangible. She could not have been guarded more effectually by the Chinese Wall, or a thicket of fire, with a paralyzed Siegfried moping without. Her liberal hints encountered an adamant obtuseness; he was not linguist enough, in her case, to read correctly frankly provocative pouts, slanted glances, even her gipsying fingers, that brushed his like the kiss of wind-wedded blossoms. These and more became substance of his erotic fancies; but the world of fantasy and of reality, in this case, he knew could never blend.
His amorous stupidity often exasperated her.
One night she yielded a narrow seat for him on the porch-swing, an openly demanded tête-à-tête, although the cushions on the stone steps and the settles within were warm with gossiping friends. "You're always so mournful when you're with me, Pelham."
"Oh, Mrs. Meade!" She tied his tongue when it came to repartee.
"Oh, Mr. Judson," she mimicked fretfully; then affirmed with decision, "you must meet Jane Lauderdale. She's about your tempo."
His eyes widened apprehensively; Dorothy's caprices were sometimes alarming. "Who's she?"
"The most serious little soul I know ... and the dearest. You'll like her, when you meet her."
"When?"
"Planning to desert me already, sir! I'll have you for a month yet; she's away."
"I'm satisfied; it's your lead;" he dropped with some gracefulness into the parlance of auction bridge.
The time came when she took the lead. The crowd were noisy at the piano one night, when Dorothy turned to him, in the tiny butler's pantry, laying her piled platter on a shelf behind his head. Lifting her chin, she said provokingly, "Don't you want to kiss me, Pelham?"
The suggestion plunged him under a quick disquieting flood of emotion. One of his precious ideals citadeling womanhood crumbled with intuitive rapidity. A warm inner lash flushed his neck and cheeks. Beyond this betrayal, which was of short duration, he showed no sign of this delicious incarnation of his remotely fantasied passion, this focalizing on the solid earth of an ethereal hunger and its satisfaction.
His arms rounded her; he brought his lips down to her level; her own, moist and cool, opened within his. The ecstatic sensation closed his eyes.
She slapped him lightly on the cheek. "That's enough, now, you big boy!"
All that evening he kept his eyes on her, and managed a pilfered caress just before leaving.
Her eyes laughed at him. "Do you know, Pelham, I'm not sure I'll wish you on Jane, after all!"
He began to time his visits to the Meade house so that they found Lyman away. One cool dusk—Lyman was in Philadelphia for the week—he veered carefully to something that was worrying him. "Nell—my sister—swears that the crowd are talking about us, Dorothy."
"Wants to wean you?" She laughed mellowly, the fluffy crown of curled gold dancing, as if sharing the mirth. "They've talked about Lyman for years, now; it hasn't slowed him. I like you far too much, boy dear, to give you up for idle tongues."
"I hate to have them mention you." He twitched restlessly. "You know what you're doing to me, Dorothy. I've been straight ... so far. You're setting me on fire. This is a slippery hill to keep straight on; I might skid."
"Meaning?" She achieved two passable smoke rings—the effort after them was her chief motive in smoking—and idly planned a gown, tinted like the furnace-glowing sky, with twined gray smoke-wreaths in couples and trios—grouped figures that blent into one, then idly drifted apart.
"Kissing's only excuse is as a prelude to love's physical finale," he answered straightly. The dusk hid her wry face, as he continued, "Lyman's in the way. You say you still love him."
"Yes...." She paraphrased, with a show of pondering, something she had read in a showy woman's magazine. "He can't help being what he is. None of us can change the material, though we may alter the pattern, or dye the goods.... Much good that would do."
"The lady turned philosopher!" His hand caressed her fluffy short sleeve caressingly. "So ... you won't take me for a lover."
"Hardly," she laughed with sober hunger, grieving at youth's lack of subtlety.
"You're setting me on fire," he repeated with somber relish. "You'll drive me to some other woman, or ... women. You'll lose me either way; you wouldn't want me then; and I——this can't last always."
"I'll run the risk, boy."
The street quieted, as the late cars from the club droned away into the mist-damp distance. As Pelham turned on his lamps for the homeward run, he saw that the great summer triangle had swung from the east to the sunset horizon; Vega's white beauty, dragging near the western hills, was smudged by the unsleeping breath of those squat furnaces and coke ovens, whose pauseless task was to transmute the riven ore into iron sows and pigs—the first step in the alchemy that transformed the skeleton of the mountain into a restless trickle of gold, urging itself into the overfull vaults of his father. Paul slept now, as the son would soon sleep; but those furnaces, and their parched servitors eternally feeding the hungry mouths of fire, did not sleep. Some tortuous filament of thought brought him back to Dorothy, and the flaming furnace that she had helped light within him ... which did not sleep. With all of the scorching rapture which her surface surrender yielded, he wondered if it would not have been better if he had not met her.... There were once three men in another fiery furnace; but they had walked out, unsinged. He knew himself well enough to be sure that he had no salamander blood; was he strong enough to tempt the break from the charring spell? Well, there was time to think of that again.
When he reached the highest crest, Vega still hung over the sullen glow of a furnace throat; but the smudge had grown darker.
The next morning his father, who seemed gifted with the ability to pierce unerringly to whatever weighed on the son's desires, went into the subject with him. "This isn't criticism, Pelham; it's an attempt to help you steer clear of any mess. Particularly with a married woman. It sounds—nasty."
The son was indignant. "There's been nothing improper. I've taken a few Sunday suppers there——"
"Of course, of course." Pelham knew these dry tones. "It doesn't pay. I ought to have talked with you before. It's easy for a young man, particularly with good financial prospects, to get roped in by some woman, married or unmarried.... Sometimes he has to pay well to get out."
"That's ridiculous, about ... about ..."
"It doesn't pay, visiting one woman," Paul continued, in matter-of-fact tones. "Young Little almost had to marry one of the telephone operators at the Stevens Hotel. His father loosened up five thousand to get rid of her. I haven't any money to waste on your foolishness."
There was a silent interval.
"If you must have a woman—I passed through the stage myself, like all young men—don't you fool with the half-decent kind. You'd better go right down to Butler's Avenue, and pay your money down for what you get. There's less chance of diseases—they have medical inspection. And it avoids a serious mix-up."
Pelham's face went white. "I don't need that kind of advice. I've kept straight so far; I intend to keep so, until I'm married. Money couldn't pay me to go there."
The older man exhaled noisily. "Remember what I said."
A swelling white rage choked the boy's voice. "Does—does mother know that you went to—such places?"
Paul turned sharply. "Of course not. There are some things women are supposed to know nothing about."
That was the end of the discussion.
Pelham gradually decreased the frequency of his visits; but he still managed precious afternoons with her in his car, and occasional evenings, which left him irritatingly disturbed. He wanted to see more of her, and knew that he should see less; he was eager even to hear her name mentioned at home, but embarrassed if it was.
"Listen, Nell," he interposed to his sister, when he was helping to draw up the list of guests for a summer fête the girls planned. "You used to be pretty fond of Mrs. Meade."
"Not much! You can't have your Dorothy here."
Pelham was exasperated with the whole lot—always excepting his mother. His long confidences with her had begun when he was a child, and still were a pleasure and a panacea. One of these talks gave aid to his bewilderment about Dorothy, although she was not mentioned. It had started inconsequentially with a discussion of little Ned's conduct, and dipped into many topics. In the course of it, he promised to sound both the brothers on their attitude toward girls, and the annoying problem of sex.
"You can do much more with the boys than I, Pelham. They'll listen to an older brother, where they wouldn't listen to their mother."
Lovingly he patted the smooth flush of her cheek, delighting in the shy wildrose beauty of her face. His fingers crept from this to the straight chestnut folds of her hair, longing to stroke its unbound cascades, and let them curtain his face, as she had done when he was a little boy in bed; as she still sometimes did.
Then he answered her. "I listened to you, mother. It was your words and your wishes that have kept me straight."
"And, please God, they will always keep my own dear son the finest, cleanest, purest man in the world."
Pelham was wholly under the spell of Mary's idealistic phrases, her sugary circumlocutions and romantic evasions of annoying facts. She had found it impossible to meet Paul's brutal logic with her ill-trained feminine inconsecutiveness; the course she took was an acceptance couched in some inoffensive generality or platitude, with a sentimentalized deity as authority for her stand. Paul pierced through the unmeaning glamor; but the children did not. When things went smashing, contrary to her plans and wishes, somehow God willed it ... a convenient, kindly-disposed arranger, unless Paul's vigorous planning took precedence. Her thirty-nine connubial articles could be summed up in one: Paul could not be wrong, in the children's eyes; her wifely duty bound her to wholesale support, even of his errors or occasional unfairnesses. "He is your father, remember," blanketed everything. "God only knows how much I love you," was her unfruitful solace to them. And she did love them, and gave of her best for them, except where fealty to Paul, who came immovably first, intervened.
This prayer of hers for the son's purity continued to ward off the imperative temptations that nearness to Dorothy, or thoughts of Butler's Avenue, spread around him. It fell on his ears now with all of the old power.
He sat, rubbing her hand against his cheek, staring off to the distant vagueness that was Shadow Mountain. The dun clouds along the horizon had obscured its outline; the sky to the south was a sickly copper. Above it pulsed and banded a tumult of smoke gray clouds; the eastern horizon was a slate blue, rapidly darkening. A far rumble of muttered thunder was followed by the vivid glare of sheet lightning, which brought into sharp relief the serrated crest of the distant hills.
Suddenly out of the dull sky came a quick spatter of big drops. She slipped from her son's embrace, and went in to see to windows and doors.
He moved a lazy flanneled leg further from the edge of the porch, where the splashing drops bounced inward.
There was a short lull. He rose, as a white tongue of fire forked its way toward the near summit of Shadow Mountain, followed immediately by a deafening pattering rattle of thunder.
Hurrying in from the front porch, his mother met him, a strained look in her eyes. "There's a storm coming, Pell. Your father's on the way home. I hope it doesn't catch him."
Pelham moved idly into the library. Out of the side window he could see the approaching wall of misty rain, blotting out the familiar outlines of trees, the negro cottage beyond the spring depression, the spring buildings, the outhouses. How quiet, how unerring and irresistible its course!
The marching fusillade of drops touched the side of the barn, and darkened it ominously: from a soft gray it shaded swiftly to a rain-drenched black. Now it menaced the house itself; now the impartial advance of the shrapnel, in slanting crystal lines, brought the house beneath its unrelenting fire.
Pelham switched on the light, and pulled out an unread volume of Stevenson. His fingers loafed over the leaves, as he listened to the persistent drive of the storm.