XXI

Three weeks after the election, the cold set in. As if to compensate for the maddening torridity of July and August, the biting tail of a snowstorm lashed bleakly over Adamsville. The white flakes danced wildly along the exposed crest of the mountain, stinging summer-seasoned skins. Blasts whistled and shrieked, piling the chill drifts along the rutty streets of Hewintown, sifting through sacks roofing the gaps in the shack shingles.

Then a day of thaw, deepening the roads into a cold slushiness; and that night a downburst of rain and hail, that cased trees, shrubs, hill-paths in a glittering coating of ice. The brittle walks cut into feet whose shoes lacked soling, the slippery steeps flung weakened women and men against pointed rocks, adding to the already over-worked Charities the chill cruelties of winter.

"Where's your overcoat, Ben, in this weather?" Pelham asked Wilson, now out on bail, as they passed on the stiffened sidewalks.

"Ain't got none, Mr. Judson. An' the wife's down with the T. B., an' no blankets in the house."

"I've got an extra coat; come on in to the office.... I'll phone Miss Lauderdale about your people before we go to town."

"There's hundreds like us; you know charity can't stretch very far. What these boys need is justice."

Pelham marveled at the untaught vision that could broaden its individual suffering into universal understanding.

Wilson had not exaggerated the matter. The white plague gained on undernourished men, their lungs rotted with underground damp and dust; on anemic wives and mothers; on starved shadows of children and feebly crying babies.

Each death piled higher their sullen hatred of the company. The overcoated deputies boasted of their huge feeding, and treated with growing insolence the wives and daughters of the men. Powder was being laid for another explosion, in spite of Dawson's frantic efforts to keep the strikers steady.

A worried meeting of the directors of the companies was called to consider the continuing deadlock. "That man Dawson is the trouble," Paul announced briefly to the chairman. "Get rid of him, and the backbone of the strike is permanently dislocated. He's a born mischief-stirrer."

"Pity he can't be hung...."

"... Or tarred and feathered."

Judge Florence reminisced from the head of the table: "In '68 we knew what to do with such riff-raff."

"It can be handled," Dudley Randolph inserted blandly. "He isn't popular with many of the men, as it is. The local unions despise him. Let me have the matter ... investigated. He won't trouble us long."

"Good."

"Your son is a bit troublesome too, Mr. Judson," confessed Henry Tuttle. "Too bad he should be tangled up in it. This thing's got to be settled; with these new English orders, it's suicide for us to withhold any force that can stop this criminal strike."

Kane looked sideways at Paul Judson, who kept his eyes on the table. The satellite spoke up uncertainly. "I'll tell you something—privately—about him, that can stop his talking ... if we must use it."

Tuttle nodded, after a glance at the inscrutable downcast gaze of the vice-president.

"Is there anyone else?" said the chairman. "That lawyer, Spence?"

"No," said Tuttle, decidedly. "He's a lawyer; a lawyer thinks as his clients do," and he smiled acidly. "Bivens, of the Voice of Labor, Bowden, Pooley, employ him. He won't risk losing his livelihood ... or go further than they will."

"It's time, Henry," Paul addressed the corporation counsel, "to go ahead with our scheme. We've won the election; minor matters can be—er, investigated, or otherwise handled. But as long as the strike lasts, we are losing; our profit sheets show it. First your move, then ... the militia. I advised it long ago, you remember."

The meeting closed with the uncomfortable, and frequent, impression that, as usual, Paul Judson's sight alone had visioned correctly future troubles—and their remedies.

The last week of November saw the playing of the withheld card. Hurrying clerks of Tuttle and Mabry served on each houseowner the final notice of eviction, granted suddenly by County Judge Little.

Roscoe Little, one of the Jackson family of that name, held a perpetual lien on the judgeship because of his triumphant spinelessness. He had never been known to express a decided opinion on either side of a question; a weak-eyed hail-fellow-well-met, with a chin like the German crown prince, he spent his mornings ruling in favor of corporation attorneys, his afternoons absorbing comic weeklies and whiskey-and-sodas at the University Club. He was unmarried; facetious barristers insisted that he could not commit himself even in affairs of the heart.

There was nothing for the miners to do but move; the rifles of the augmented deputies were an unanswerable persuasion. A few miles up the valley the gray sandstone hill behind the mountain was undeveloped. Spence secured the land at a slight rental, and here tents and scrap-timber shacks did something to keep out the bitter winds of winter.

Pelham helped in the moving, as did many of the socialists. Old Peter came up to him in Hewintown the last day. "Mornin', Mr. Pelham."

"What you doing here, Peter?"

The ancient negro pointed with pride to the shined badge on his coat. "Dey done made me a deppity, dey is."

Pelham turned off.

"Mr. Pelham, ole Tom Cole done come back."

"Not dead yet?"

"You cain't kill 'im. Dey cut 'im open, but he growed back agin. He am powerful sickly, do'. De Ole Boy'll cotch him nex' time; he nacherally favors preachers."

"But not company deputies, Peter?"

The negro chuckled off; Pelham walked back with Dawson from the new shack village. The big organizer was thoroughly out of spirits. "It just ain't moving, Judson."

"What's especially wrong?"

"The negro question, for one thing."

"I know," Pelham said slowly. "Our white labor won't assimilate them, as the rest of the country's labor does to the most backward white races. They're a perpetual scab menace."

"Hell, yes," in sobered agreement. "Then, the South's general backwardness."

"That's natural, here. Our capitalists, some of the slave-owning blood, and all inheriting its attitude, feel less equality: they see labor still as their slaves. Ultimately this will help awaken our people; but now——"

"That's the hell of it; we ain't got the public with us. What with petty union squabbles, and all—it's a job to make a dent in a saint's patience."

"Any chance of a sympathetic strike?"

"What can you do with Bowden and these yellow pups?"

The enthusiasm of the workers, dragged down physically by the hard rigors, slipped lower and lower. Picketing continued, and each arrival of new trainloads of northern scabs threatened a break; but something of the original zest had gone.

Pelham, however, found a compensating zest, in which life overpaid him for the wintry gloom at strike headquarters. After a glum day with the dispirited leaders he could count upon a solace that overbalanced worry and sorrow; downhearted planning for the intransigent struggle gave way to warm-hearted dusk dreams of a future bent to heart's will; the mines and miners were deserted for Jane.

"It doesn't seem fair, dearest dear, for us to be so unreasonably happy, when Ben Wilson, and his tubercular wife, and all the rest, have so little...."

"Your father isn't a happy man."

"... No. He may have been as happy as we, once; fancy him as a young lover! There is a price for ambition centered in grasping things: the soul dries up and shrivels."

"Poor man!"

"This is the real wealth...."

He took her within his arms. At home in his kiss, her lips parted slightly within his, like a bud daring to offer its tenderest petals to the crush of the enveloping wind. When he let her go, he lay slack with delicious unrest.

Abruptly he sat up, a decisive ring in his voice. "I'm going to marry you, Jane."

"I had hoped so." She could not prevent the dimple from smiling within her rounded cheek.

"I mean—now!"

"To-night?"

"I'll get the license to-morrow, adorable child—and we can have Dr. Gulley, or the mayor——"

"Let's have His Honor! An Irish blessing isn't to be scoffed at, and the Free Tabernaclers, as rebels, are a bit pallid. 'The Courthouse Wedding'—how your mother will relish that!"

"They wouldn't come anyhow——"

"It isn't that; but they've gotten so used to your shocking them, that life would lose its savor if you couldn't achieve a fresh shock every month or two. I'm glad my new suit came——"

"As if that made any difference!"

"Ah, it will make a lot—to His Honor, for instance, and whatever reporters carry word of it to the society editresses. 'A dove-colored traveling suit,' they'll call it——"

"Wouldn't red be more appropriate?" he queried judiciously. "With the local en masse as best man, and the Suffrage Association as matron of honor——"

"Don't be horrid. I'll have Mrs. Anderson, and you can bring along your precious Lane Cullom, who is so sure that Nellie Tolliver would be much better for you."

"It's almost a Christmas wedding! We'll steal off for that week to Pascagoula and New Orleans we mentioned. We could take the Gulf Express to-morrow night—you have a time table; I brought it out last month, when we aircastled on honeymoons.... But just think, if you hadn't scorned the country club, you might have had either of the Birrell boys, or——"

"You angler! It's not too late.... No; I have the pick of the bunch."

"Jane, my ... wife." There was comfort and joy in the word.

Considering the matter alone, he was delighted he had dared the plunge. It was not easy, now, to prevent yielding to the watchful voices ever whispering to him, wakened by Dorothy Meade, refired by the rocketing affair with Louise, and now restirred by Jane herself. He had even wandered once or twice down Butler's Avenue and the furtive alleys behind, obsessed with red-lit imaginings of what went on behind those night-lighted windows. His aggressive purism had left him; love should be freely given and taken, he told himself. And it was to be his!

Odd that he had suggested New Orleans, when Louise Richard might be there.... It was a relief that that affair was dead.... This was to-day; the to-morrows were Jane's.

After his departure Jane located the time-table. She studied the formal details dreamily. To-morrow night, by this time, they would be.... And when they had passed this place, and that, what would they be saying? What doing?

The black and white schedule merited respect; it would time their first day ... night ... together.

She laid it aside with a blush; then, bidding her fancies behave, she read over the unemotional schedule until she knew it, appropriately, by heart.

Gulf Express P. M.
Hazelton | 8.07|
ADAMSVILLE |Ar. 8.20|

Exercising the best man's prerogative, Lane Cullom insisted upon having the abbreviated wedding party as his guests at a bridal dinner. The chef at the University Club grill lifted the covers promptly at six, in order that the Queen and Crescent's prized express might not have to cool its wheels in the new Union Station, waiting for the essential pair.

Lane, a satisfied fatigue relieving the crease in his brow, almost missed the first course. "I had to see that the eggnog was mixed properly, Pelham, before it was frozen,—soup or no soup."

The last delicious morsel melted upon their tongues; the host paid a final flying visit to the club's pantry, conscripting two pocketfuls of rice. "Now let's go!"

ADAMSVILLE |Lv. 8.30|

Jane leaned over the back railing of the observation platform, as the engine grunted a command to the wheels to take up their proletarian revolutions; the clanged gate quivered before her; her husband stood at her side. She leaned for a final finger-flutter to the two friends, peering at her out of the golden haze thrown by the big station lamps.

"Good luck," she called back. Her handful of the hailed rice, scooped desperately the last minute, was aimed badly; it baptized a bewildered family, chiefly children, still looking for the obtrusively obvious exit.

"Good luck," Pelham's deeper tones echoed hers.

The oiled switches, affectionately clearing the way for the long iron carriage and its coupling hearts, creaked beneath them, as the cars slid and jangled down the yards, between the furnacetown shanties, into the winter-shriven suburban streets. Jane's placid smile followed her man as he joined two of the comfortable chairs; her hands locked within his, her cheek rested against the warm roughness of his, her eyes watched the flying world curtsey and part behind them, then gradually coalesce into a welded and blurred oblivion. They were turning their backs upon the mountain her Pelham loved; not for good ... yes, for good, but not for all time.

West Adamsville |8.37|

The mountain was going with them; its inscrutable mass, off to the left, still followed, a protection and a reminder. What a boyish fancy of his, that it mothered him! Well, it could safely leave the task to her, Jane reflected; he was worth mothering—her first child.... A sudden freshet of tenderness lifted her arm around his shoulder.

This station they had just left—to think that its scattered home-lights held striving hearts who had followed her Pelham through the harsh campaign, and looked to him as children to their leader. And now he was hers, hers! And she would see to it that she kept him theirs.

Hers ... as she must be his. She dared to inch her fancies beyond their previous bounds. As a modern woman, she reminded herself, she knew from her reading the essential facts of mated life; but feelings were of different breed: words could not communicate unfelt emotions, they could only evoke memories of those formerly experienced. The emotional Atlantic lay before her.... To-night? She could not tell.

Coalstock |8.57|

"What are you thinking of, dear?" she asked.

"Geographically.... Reminiscing.... Bragg County ends in a few miles; my last speech, before the final one in Main Park, was in the Elks' Hall here."

She looked with added interest at the bare platform, the forlorn pair of station idlers, the morose baggage man trundling away a lone trunk. He looked up as they passed, started, took off his hat to the recent candidate.

"I like that man," she declared inconsequentially. "He knows you."

The glassed spaces of the observation platform were small defense against the subtle penetration of the winter night. The bland porter navigated down the car aisles, bundling steamer blankets, which radiated inward the body's waves of heat.

"The old life dead, the glad new one born," her husband mused aloud. "Except a man become as a little child again——For it is a heaven we plan."

"A democracy, not a kingdom, dear?"

"Never a kingdom, unless with a queen equally powered; and no subjects. The old subserviences are dying; with us they are dead. A real equality of mating; the slave-woman attitude gone forever, as we are laboring on the mountain to end the slave-man attitude."

"It is a friendly old universe, dear, to fling us together, on the uncertain upwhirl of the lassoed earth, to complement each other...."

"Blossom to blossom, bird to bird, man to woman," he paired.

"Jackson in two hours," he went on, after a pause.

Was he consciously making conversation, to keep her mind off of what must be the burden of its agitated thinking, the growing tumult stirred and heightened by the night's resistless progress toward their own intimate morning? She appreciated the diversion; soon he was deep in the rich memories of easy Jackson days.

Her mind twisted over other matters at the same time. Marriage meant so little to a man, compared to what it meant to a woman! Pelham, she believed, was chaste; he had told her so. There was no way of knowing. But love accomplished changed woman irrevocably. It seemed unfair. She re-breathed a silent prayer that she would not find him coarse ... even a little. It had been disillusioned Dorothy who had warned her that all men were.... Not her man.

Twice the porter had opened the door with suggestive obtrusiveness; it must be nearly eleven. Shivering with a disquiet almost unbearable, she responded to the caressing modulations in his voice, as he told of his childhood; even though its warmth was caused by recollections of other arms than her own. His deep affection for his mother, despite the occasional flippancy he used now, was no secret to the wife.

The whistle wailed rhythmically across the level stubble fields.

His face lit up. "That was Newtown we whizzed by; my father started it. Hideous place!" But the tone was affectionate.

Jackson |11.02|

He consulted his watch; they were running four minutes behind.

As the train picked up speed, his eyes bored the obscurity. "That dark place ... somewhere there is the road to Uncle Jimmy Barbour's farm. You'll see it all with me soon, dearest dear."

She looked ahead toward the darkness he indicated. Now they had plunged past it.

She heard the porter approach for the third time. Pelham's tone was a trifle uneven. "The stateroom's made up? Thanks very much. Will you call us in time for Pascagoula?"

Us!... Jane's heart thumped; she wondered if his ears could fail to hear it.

"Dearest," he said slowly, "will you go in?... I'll come in half an hour.... Will that be enough?"

Her reply was so low, she wondered if he could have heard. He held her to him for a moment, as if unhappy to lose one moment of her. And then she shut the door, and turned into the lighted isolation of the stateroom, soon to offer her to a panicky common publicity.

... She heard him open the outer door; her flurried fingers summoned the unbetraying darkness.

A. M.
Lower Peachtree |4.10|

Jane stared out of the bare three inches of the misted window; she had raised the curtain that much. The train was gaining momentum again. The unbroken night sped by; only her imagination could give it form and life. The unbroken future lay ahead; drowsily she reflected that only her imagination, her shaping hand, could mold it to the heaven they both desired. Pelham was at last asleep ... her husband was asleep....

Her hand lowered the curtain again. Facing the chill blackness without the window, she tried to drowse off. At length she turned toward him, for the moment absent, yet still tangibly hers. She snuggled into the warmer place by his side, touching him to make sure he was still there.

MOBILE |Ar. 4.45|
MOBILE |Lv. 4.53|

There was no consciousness stirring in the breathing state-room, to note the stop and the few belated night-travelers for the western gulf region. But in their dreams these two, separated by sleep, were again united. There was a smile playing across Jane's cheek; and a deep content resting upon Pelham's face.

East Pascagoula |7.01|

Pelham sat on the edge of a chair, his face downcast in mock despair. "You make me feel so useless, Jane! Not even a dress to hook up the back——"

Altering a final hatpin, she smiled a query to him. "Is it on straight, beloved? The train wobbles so.... Dresses were hooked up the back ten years ago; of course, you've had practice on Mother Judson's.... Stand up a moment." With great gravity she readjusted his stick-pin. "There!"

He pulled her to the window. "Look—Back Bayou! Though it's really a pudgy finger of the gulf. And schooners ... this side.... Isn't it gorgeous?"

The train, perched on a spidery trestle, crawled high above the sloshing waves, broken by blackened oyster-bed stakes and a skiff slapping against the dismembered head of a narrow pier. Seabirds rose in glancing curves, the red face of the sun lit the waters on both sides of the three-masters tacking out beyond Horn Island. Abruptly the water was blotted out at the end of the bridge by stumpy sedge fields, stretching to a fringe of low pines framing the sparkling water beyond ... then trim white houses. The train slowed.

Pascagoula |7.13|

"Here we are," Pelham's joyful tones fathered the last of the luggage, laboriously lowered by the stout porter.

The husband beckoned the nearest hackman, a darky patriarch venerable as his grizzle-flanked steed. "The Ocean House, please."

Jane settled into Pelham's crescenting arm.

"We're here," he added fatuously. "Isn't it——"

"Glorious!"

They stared ahead together, to the sandy beach and the sun-glitter of the water.