XIX
Life at the Hernandez home had its definite compensations, Pelham found. A nearby garage held the indispensable car; and there was now no one to censor his comings and goings. As long as he slept on the mountain, Mary clung to this rôle; the relief of the lifted restraint was immediate.
His mining inspector's badge gave him the run of the mountain property, although he was careful not to use it in direct union propaganda.
One afternoon late in August, Jim Hewin came up to him on a downtown avenue. "Howdy, Mr. Judson. Say," and the shifty eyes nervously agitated toward Pelham's face, "I could do you a good turn if I wanted to."
"What's that?"
"I got some dope you'd give a heap to know."
The other regarded him with suspicion. "What about, Hewin?"
"I know what the company's got up its sleeve. I can put you wise, all right. What's in it for me?" He waited, expectant.
Pelham choked down his disgust. "Not a cent. If you'd sell out my father, you'd sell us out as quickly." He walked off in impotent anger against the go-betweens seeking to fatten on the bitter struggle.
The local mining board assigned Pelham to the property he was most familiar with: either for that reason, or through a grim irony. As mining inspector, he secured access to all the books of the company. This gave him needed statistics for his report on the strike situation, and kept him busy, and, against his will, away from Jane, and the solace and spur of the hours with her.
The problem began to shape itself more clearly, now that he had become to a greater extent weaned from mountain and family. The whole opposition to the miners' demands was summed up and centered, in his mind, in that dominant personality of Paul Judson. Similarly he felt that he embodied the opposing forces. Without his presence, his thinking told him, the strike would have come just the same; but he knew that his cordial efforts had stiffened the fight of the workers more than they imagined.
It was a stake worth fighting for, that vast prone bulk overshadowing Adamsville, rich with the congealed essence of the ages. His father fought for himself, and for the group of spoilers who sought to bleed it for their selfish sakes. The son's cause was the cause of the people—of the toiling, inarticulate herd fettered by ignorance and immemorial adjustment to serfdom. Democracy against oppression—it was the real fight which the Adamsville press short-sightedly claimed was being waged over sea and sky and land against the war-mad encroachment of autocracy. The warring causes abroad were cloudy; the local situation was clear. So he told himself; and the parallel spoke strongly in his stirring speeches to the patient union fighters.
A new masterfulness radiated in his utterances. As a servant of the State, as well as a contender for the people, he was close to the tangled heart of the intricate struggle. He felt surer of himself than ever.
The mood of restrained audacity found itself cabined and confined in the irritation of mining statistics. The card for the University Club summer dance came opportunely; he went, too, through a perverse joy in embarrassing the good people of Adamsville by his disconcerting presence, and in studying their varied reactions to his new rôle.
He joined the group in the grill, a little diffident as to his reception. Lane Cullom, unchanging adherent of old, caught him by both hands. "You darned stranger! What'll it be?"
Lane led him and Hallock Withers, a clubman Pelham knew casually, to one of the cosy benched tables. "Never forget that you're in the presence of His Honor the State Mining Inspector, Hal. He's a nut in politics, but he can play tennis."
"Haven't lifted a racket in four months."
The friend laid an affectionate hand on Pelham's flannels. "I brought a girl you've just got to meet, Pell! She's from New Orleans, and she is some trotter! Visiting the Tollivers——"
Pelham grimaced.
"Nothing like Nellie, don't worry! Her name is Louise Ree-sharr——"
"What in the world!"
Lane grunted defensively. "Something like that. Old New Orleans family, and all the rest——"
The prospect did not attract; but the girl did. She had an opulent fulness that stopped distinctly short of being plump. Her large eyes reminded him at once of Jane's, and then of his mother's; but there was an artistry about their seeming candor that seduced his fancy. The burst of red roses at her waist did not outshine the glow of her complexion; vivid dark brown hair sparkled with brilliants set in a quaint tortoise shell comb. Each of the unimportant details assumed significance as contributing to the totality of full-blown charm.
She laid a proprietary arm in his, as they passed through the rainbow glimmer of Oriental lanterns swaying between the lawn trees. "Is Adamsville always as deadly as this? New Orleans is bad enough—but this!"
His throaty chuckle answered her. "I assure you I don't know."
"You live here?"
"I'm not a clubman. Life's too busy."
"Sounds imposing. What do you do, besides dance and use those serious eyes?"
"That's all my regular vocation. At off times I play tennis, wave my hair in the breeze, and inspect mines."
"It's nice hair." She regarded it thoughtfully.
"You can pull it."
With amused tolerance she smoothed it, then yanked it suddenly.
"Ouch! I treasure that."
An egotistic restlessness urged him. He thought once or twice of Jane, as he monopolized this girl. By an emotional vagary he connected the other with the clipped and forbidden rigors of the mountain life, which he had divorced finally.
"How about dinner at the club to-morrow night, and the dance afterwards? Or a ride?"
"But I'm to go out to the James', at Meadow Valley. Are you going?"
"Ethel James'?... I haven't been asked."
"Would they include you? Could I suggest it? It's an informal affair. It'll break up early."
"I think it will be all right. She's here to-night.... We could have dinner first."
He found an infrequent sparkle in her conversation, a pretty froth of talk that pleased. But it was not for this that he sought her out. The urge to wander that the mountain had sown in his blood impelled him most of all. He felt his imagination inflamed by the stimulus of her presence, the vivid challenge of her eyes, the audacious invitation of her lips. He had met no woman hitherto who so invited love-making. She seemed a rounded vessel brimfull of soft airs and caressing modulations of speech, that promised more than the bare words warranted.
On the return from the James' country home, they shot ahead of the other cars, purring in poised flight down the smooth macadam of the county road. He turned off into the upward slope above Hazelton that led to the mountain; he regarded himself as its privileged showman. In front of the drowsy trimness of farm houses they pulsed, until at last he stopped the engine where the road rounded over a steep outcrop dropping a jagged hundred feet to the steep tree-y declivity below.
"There's a bench. It's a wonderful view," he said, his speech thickened—the old timidity at the moment when passion possessed him again struggling against his desire.
She took the seat he indicated. The cool whip of the breeze sprayed him with the faint suggestion of lilas that hung about her person. He tried to pull his senses from her overwhelming fascination.
"Isn't it wonderful?"
She nodded, lips apart, eyes starry. Discarding his shield of constraint, he turned swiftly on her, catching the filmy fabric covering her arms and bringing her face toward him.
Her voice was level, conventional. "You mustn't." She tried to squirm away.
"Yes!" He whispered his urgent triumph.
His lips avid from long self-denial, he blent with the wild sweetness of hers. She remained quiescent a moment, then sought to free herself. He clung to her, as if his life depended on retaining the warm rapture of her kiss. She thought he would never end.
At last she pulled away, a trifle dazed with the force of his passion. His lips fell lower, kissing her shoulder, her arm, the hand squeezing the taut ball of her handkerchief. As she took even this from him, he fell to his knees beside her, pressing long kisses on the handkerchief, any symbol to satisfy the aching hunger of his body.
She watched him in wonder. Her hand faltered out and pressed back the damp hair from his forehead. "You poor boy! You poor, starved boy!"
The paroxysm over, he sat at her feet, moodily watching the lower reaches of the valley. He realized the breach of faith with Jane; but there was a perverse part of him that rejoiced at the duplicity. The other love was chaste, beside this; after all, he could love more than one woman.... Should he stop with one wrenched rose, when the bush was on fire with red beauty?
Again he sat beside her. "You know, Louise," he urged tentatively, enough withdrawn from the scene to study her reaction to his conduct, "I've been straight with women.... You are the only girl I have kissed in a year."
It trembled on her tongue to say that he had made up for lost time; no, that would sound too flippant. "I know, I know," her answer rang rich with soft understanding.
It was the next night that she reverted to the matter, the fluent voluptuousness of her body still tingling from the harsh tenderness of his arms. "You're a funny boy.... What you said last night...."
"I said so much!"
Her thought could not be laughed away. "About your keeping straight, you know.... I have a friend—she only married last Mardi Gras—who always insisted she wanted a man who had had experience.... Girls have queer notions, haven't they?"
"I should think the girl would feel soiled ... that way. I should hate to have my mind filled, on my wedding night, comparing the wonderful girl I had won ... with ... other women I had had."
The perverse infidelity shook him again. "And yet I kiss." He turned the word into fact.
"There's no logic in it," he persisted, his body eased with the lip-contact. "Kissing shouldn't be wasted, any more than the rest. It's only a prelude to the more wonderful finale...."
"I enjoy the prelude," she temporized, in lazy content.
"And afterwards——" he breathed on his hand pausing fearfully on the tantalizing silken softness of her cool ankle, then straying with restrained gusto toward the edge of the lacy fabric above.
"No," she smiled. He solaced an obedient spirit with the touch of the denying lips.
The next afternoon he never forgot. They started early for Shadow Mountain, promising the Tollivers to return with mountain azalea, if it was still blooming. She dismissed this as an excuse.
Over the iron bridge curving above Shadow Creek's muddy bluster they hummed, and then up the hill. They left the car in the shade of a sandy lane, and clambered up the steep intricacies of sandstone, to a wide table-rock slipped from the hoary buttresses above. Beyond this were the azaleas.
The sun-splashed slope was a dizzy riot of the rosy blossoms. A fringe of the stocky shrubs curved over the jutting shelf of the rock, burning with timid pink blossoms at the crest of their blooming. A few of the individual flowers had passed maturity, and hung in the woodland wind, perilously pendent from the long pistils. Louise, rejoicing in the soft gray-green of her smock, lifted a big spray of the scented beauties and nested her face in them. A brown shimmer of hair caught on a nervy twig: Pelham undid it with unnecessary deliberation, and took pay for his chivalry.
They turned to the flowers. Uneven ripples of color spread from the gray rock's knees toward the blue crest horizon, a fragrant carpeting of pink and white and every modulation down to a deep ruby. To the right a veritable tree of speckled petals, frilled and dancing on airy feet in the sun-drizzle. A curveting breeze blew up a spray of flowery snow, dusting their footing. The farther blossoms seemed, by some trick of vision, a flowery fabric clinging veil-like above the gay green beneath. It was a restless pool of glowing color and odor.
From bush to bush they zigzagged, until her face was bowered in the bright sprays, and his fingers weary with whittling their stems. He took them from her, left her on the rock, and piled the flowers over the rear seat.
As he returned, his eyes rose restfully from her blossomed opulence to the lake of blooms. "There seem to be more here than before! They grow faster than we pick."
She made room for him beside her. Her head found a soft pillow in his coat; lazily she stretched her body on the natural couch of lichened firmness.
His lips burned greedily against the soft flush of her neck. He let his torch-like body rest half upon hers, for a long silence of tantalizing rapture. At length, repentant at the thought of Jane, he swung to a seat beside the other girl. In a moment he was conscious only of her, proud with an inner satisfaction in the man's rôle he was sure he was playing; more strongly than either of these feelings, afraid—afraid of himself, afraid lest the urgent emotions writhing within him would drive control from him, and force him into a situation which would be, no matter its outcome, unsettling, disquieting....
Man's innate tendency to mate as freely as the vast mountain oaks, shaking their pollen broadcast on every breath of breeze, was in him; but this had been tamed and sublimated, by his mother's overfond molding, by her pricking desire to keep him hers and no other woman's as long as possible, into an ingrowing chastity, a morbidly re-fondled rejection of sex, except for the arm's-length wooing of Jane. But the very opulence of his flowering mountain spoke against this, urged an abandon to the fierce ecstasies of yielding and taking. The warring wills found a sanguine battle-ground within him. There was a throbbing zest in tantalizing himself, by postponing the inevitable necessity of some choice. He must think it out carefully; he could wait....
Shaking her skirts free of littering twigs, she rose. He was a puzzle. She steadied herself by his arm. "I like it here," she summed up softly.
The wild azalea filled the glassed sunroom of the Tollivers with a faint echo of the glory of the distant mountain.