XXII
Pascagoula and the gulf towns boast themselves, quite properly, as warm weather resorts. Jane, coming from a northern city, had never quite understood how Southerners could go further south for the summer; but the immediate sight of this resort in winter convinced her. Pascagoula in December was kin to Coney Island in March—a background built of flimsy, emptied by the chill; a tenantless shell, whose pleasure-seekers hibernated elsewhere, to more substantial shelter. It had its own incongruous charm for lovers, who never mourn at isolation.
There was a thoughtful delight in tempting the shaky remnants of wharves, broken and scattered by the whip-lash of the last equinoctial storms, and as yet not rebuilt. They visited by launch the breakwater islands, Horn Island with its fishing colony, Deer Island's populous turtle farms, and the lighthouses and dismantled fort upon the sandy spit called Ship Island. Here they walked a beach littered with curled conchs, horseshoe crab shells, and debris from the deeper waters washed up for a glassy-eyed view at the hitherto unseen sun.
By electric line they touched at Beauvoir for an afternoon—Beauvoir, as surely of the Old South as the decaying mansions at Jackson; a great-pillared white house back in a grove of giant leafless oaks. Its ample spaces and huge hand-hewn beams belonged less to the faded Confederate soldiers and their wives tenanting it than to its memories of Jefferson Davis, that passionate advocate of slavery, whose name is enshrined beside the warrior leaders of the buried cause.
"We can enjoy the firm beauty of the place—it is so alien, so remote," Jane meditated, as, her arm upon his shoulder, she turned Pelham for a last view at the mausoleum of gray hopes. "Like the Punic war; or the time-blotted conquests of the Incas, before the Spaniards came."
"Yes; their cause, with their time, has grown unreal. Slavery is almost prehistoric, with the modern battles upon us. Old Grandfather Judson knew Jeff Davis, and visited here.... Thank God the South didn't win!"
"Slavery would have died its natural death anyway."
"But union was worth while.... Isn't it, dearest?"
She pressed his arm appreciatively.
They spent the rest of the week in New Orleans. During these days his untried fantasies changed to reality, with the gradual knowledge of this lithe, lovely girl beside him, who had, by some freak of good fortune, given herself to him ... taken him for her mate. It was hard to avoid the rut of old phrasings of the ever-new relationship.
Out of the thick turmoil of the French Market and the gaudy fittings of the Hotel Iberville they found their way to the river, and wandered up its leisurely levee. The ancient lure of the sea spoke in the rank smell of drying nets and decaying barnacles on the tide-abandoned piles, of redolent fishing catboats and tarry roping. She curled behind him on a solitary bale of cotton awaiting belated shipment, staring out at the muddy water, and the tangled masts and rigging up and down stream.
"How would you like to sail the seven seas?" she asked idly. "Down this river, over the gulf and the Caribbean, and then out across the unroaded way of the world's ocean?" Watching him dust his feather-gray ash on a splintery beam, she shielded a lighted match to give new life to the moist brown mass packed within the bowl.
"With you along?"
"That would be yours to say. You must remain free, as I am; if love lasts, yes; if not——"
"And that very freedom, that modern marriage includes, adds preciousness to love; the danger of losing forges a stronger bond."
"Thus freedom involves a slavery greater, because voluntary. Where my heart is, I am content to serve," she smiled.
But something within her doubted how deep this shrining of freedom went. She had noticed, at last night's opera, an attractive girl in another box bow to her husband with provoking familiarity. "Louise Richard, a friend of Lane Cullom's," he had explained; "I met her in Adamsville." But ... her husband! If any woman presumed to get free with him, modernism would be flung aside for primitive emotions. Mating bred possession.... He was such a lover! She smiled a perverse thanksgiving that he was—a little—coarse. Love must be planted in the earth, to grow toward the stars.
Pelham's thought drove down a not dissimilar channel. Of course Jane was entitled to hold to her idea of freedom; there was little chance of her ever wanting to make it more than an idea. But let a man dare sneak into her affections, and there would be an immediate casualty list, which would not include a descendant of the Judsons. He was amused at the bloodthirsty throwback; nevertheless, he would do something.... His thought recurred to the sight of Louise Richard, between the acts at the theater; how incomparably superior Jane was! And yet.... Freedom in love had its compensations.... Louise had said something about revisiting Adamsville.... At once he put the half-formed fancy out of his mind; Jane was enough, now and henceforth.
He returned, at a tangent, to the former subject. "Just as you are free to remain skeptical about socialism, while I am of it."
"Not skeptical, Pelham; but.... Put it this way. It hasn't the overwhelming importance to me that it has to you. To me, woman's cause comes first; with suffrage an essential incident. I do see that socialism doesn't go to the roots of everything."
He exclaimed lazily, "Of course not! And I like, more and more, your idea, that floated hazily out one night—that geography lay beneath all the economic forces we socialists orate over."
"On behalf of my intelligence, I thank you," she teased.
"Silly! The idea is underneath Marx and the rest; but it hasn't been said clearly yet. I've dipped into more American history, these workless weeks; it fits amazingly there....
"This stuff the professors wax magniloquent over, that America was planned as a land of freedom! Mere fudge and fury! Who planned it free? The Spaniards, arrogant haters of the common people? The paternalistic French? The Dutch and Swedes, just as committed to autocracy?..."
"There were the 'freedom-loving Englishmen'...."
"Jamestown, settled by gold-hunting, venturesome gentlemen of King James' Court! So Maryland, and the Carolinas; with Georgia merely to give an opportunity for homeland failures to build a younger England, casted as the old. Plymouth, all of New England, except Rhode Island, wanted merely State Puritanism, under the old feudal system. Roger Williams was an exception; Penn's inner light saw a vision of ultimate democracy. But—two out of thirteen!"
"No, it wasn't planning that made democracy and freedom our spreadeagle catchwords," she agreed.
"It was the land," he took up the thread. "The land has expressed itself, and will express itself more magnificently in the future, in the achieved reality of those Fourth of July slogans. Pioneer hardships develop men equal in their labors and their needs; crude democracy thrives along civilization's frontiers. The restless Arabs, the migratory Israelites, grew brotherhood as self-protection. Europe's cramping strait-jackets could not fit empty miles of prairie, or stream and mountain and farm-land ready to mint gold when man's labor was poured on them."
"The idea helps clear history," she helped on the mood. "Protected Egypt and Babylon, guarded by desert and sea and swamp, grew a hot-housed tyranny because of their over-fertile rivers; somewhat as New Orleans here."
"To show the influence another way, I've often thought of this parallel. Compare the languages of Europe and America. The Eskimo, harshly explosive and guttural, corresponds to the Russian; the freezing air chops off the final syllable into a bark or cough. The dialects of the Iroquois and northern Algonquins are similar to the harshness of Teutonic and Scandinavian countries; the soft melodiousness of Spanish, French, Italian, is found in words like 'Miami,' 'Appalachicola,' 'Tuscaloosa,' 'Monongahela,' with their easy liquids and lazy final vowels. The country itself creates the language, the facial expressions, the bodies and habits of men."
"That's true—and new, to me. Of course it's a platitude that the little fragments of Greece, locked apart by mountain and sea, were themselves the cause preventing Greece from uniting into a great nation——"
"Just as the long western field of Italy fitted her to be a unifying world power."
She confessed, "I've since found the same idea expanded charmingly by Fairgrieve. Phœnicia and Israel were important because they were on the way connecting the Nile to the twin rivers——"
"The earth's hand is in it all. Great cities follow the rivers, or the newer streams of iron we call railroads; civilizations grow where differing cultures touch, as at the meeting of Asia, Europe, and Africa. Think what its location—sea-walled and sea-warmed—has made of the island miles of England!... Mountains breed freedom-lovers; my mountain made me."
"My thanks to it! It has stirred up trouble——"
"Yes." He continued slowly, "All we have been through in Adamsville—that was only the mountain speaking through its human mouthpieces. Our country's first democracy was squabbling competition; then came selfish coöperation, for the few on top: trusts and monopolies. The hill's rich heart expresses that in the mining companies ... in my father. But it gives enough worth to the plain man to allow him to unite with his fellows, and mold this destructive selfishness into saner brotherhood, wider coöperation—the labor movement, groping after democracy; I and the others are the mountain speaking in that. It is the prime mover, the hero and the villain, shifting us about at its will to express all that lies hidden in its rich interior."
"We must make it join the local.... I hope it favors suffrage."
"Joyful joker!"
"I like what you say about the vastness of America," she repeated.
"More than vastness. It has the proper balance of material that yields not too easily, so that an Egyptian race of slaves must follow; nor with such difficulty that it must remain like the backward Eskimos. Its men and women will be self-sure, mentally able to build democracy in industry, in government, in everything. What a world, when we grow up to our words—when classes blend into one class of worthy men and women——"
"Supermen?"
"Another way of saying it.... When exploitation is ended, when we produce for need and not profit, when a man's highest selfishness will be to serve all, not pile up a backyard hoard of gold. Call it socialism or what you please, it will come; it is self-planted by and in our soil. The mountain will win, in the long run, not for its despoiler, but for all of its red-handed, ore-stained children. Work will be distributed, life lengthened, wealth and joy evened——"
"A big program cut out for Mr. Pelham Judson!"
"Not for me, heavens, no! I can only do my little part. It will use me ... just as it has used poor Babe Cole, dead on the railroad track, or his brothers, dead in the explosion and the shooting; just as it uses even Dick Sumter, Henry Tuttle, incredible little Roscoe Little, whose judicial rompers are merely a materialization of the greed of the corporations. All of their rich thefts will be taken from them, when the scales have finally adjusted themselves...."
"Nice old earth!" She patted the post beside her affectionately. "Just like a big brown doggie! We think, and bother; and to it we are no more than irritations on its skin, or little insects bred of it there. Our stirring annoys it: Vesuvius and Pelé, or an earthquake.... The old world sniffs and snuffles down the fenced sky, leashed to the sun, its rope always a little shorter.... And a good warm sleep to it at the end, before cold night sets in."
Pelham shook his head in despair. "You say it so much better than I—the final word...."
"Come on, if we're to take that trip to Lake Pontchartrain before night." She prodded him off the bale, linking a comradely arm within his. "You notice that woman's 'final' word, as always, is followed by man's lament that she says the last thing. No," as he sought to answer, "it needs no footnote. At least I have you to myself this week, before the mountain woos you from me again."
Tired by the flat miles of rice-fields, swamp-land, and bayou, they returned to the haven of the hotel. Pelham had the elevator wait while he secured an armful of local papers.
"Nothing from Adamsville," scanning the pages rapidly, unaware how the mountain still held him. "Nothing.... Here it is. Another fight, with the invariable demand for the militia."
"You don't think they'll——"
"I certainly hope not. That would cause a smash-up."
The week ended; the return began. Just above Lower Peachtree, they secured an early edition of the Times-Dispatch, and found that the strike shared first-page headlines with the elaborate plans for the iron city's semi-centennial. The attack was more serious than the out-of-town papers had reported. Two guards, three strike-breakers, and an uncertain number of strikers had been killed; John Dawson's indignant statement that the deputies had fired first, and without provocation, was smothered in the body of the story; while the front page heading quoted Judge Florence to the effect that the company saw no other way to stop bloodshed than by immediate presence of the soldiers. A hurried meeting of the Commercial Club backed up this demand.
"They'll try to wipe the boys out," groaned Pelham, bitterly. "They may have planted this fight, for an excuse. We must have won too many strike-breakers."
An inside page held an account of the conviction of Nils Jensen, Benjamin Wilson, Lafe Puckett and a negro named Moses Pike for attempting to dynamite the ramp opening.
"They're out for blood now," Pelham commented somberly, after reading the brief announcement.
"They won't get you for anything, dear?" she queried quickly.
"I don't believe so.... You never can tell."
On their arrival, he sent Jane home by taxi, and went at once to strike headquarters. Two men lay sleeping on a rug thrown into the corner, their faces gray and exhausted. A young miner, his arm bandaged, sat at the table with Spence and several others.
"Hello, Judson. Just in time for the big round," the lawyer greeted grimly.
They walked over to the window. "Two companies arrive to-night," Spence continued. "By to-morrow they'll proclaim martial law for the entire mountain district...." His tone grew shrilly significant. "That includes the place where the boys live now."
"What can we answer?"
The lawyer lifted wearied shoulders. "Do what we can. We won't quit, but——I saw what they did in '04, remember."
"No chance for justice from the soldiers? I know some of the boys in the local company——"
"My dear man, the company gave 'em new brass buttons, new rifles, new bullets! Where will they put those bullets, do you suppose? It's irony for you: most of the soldiers were once laborers; labor's money pays for their food and their rifles; and labor receives their fire. Of course, if we can avoid trouble——It's our only hope; we can win, if we can prevent a smash-up."
"What about Jensen?"
"I'm appealing; that'll tie it up for a year. But the cards are marked, and they are dealing."
Pelham escaped from the headquarters of suffering for a hurried trip out to the miners' tent settlement. On the way back, he saw in the state road ahead a familiar boyish figure; as he reached it, fourteen-year-old Ned turned and saw him.
"Hey, give us a lift, Pell!" The brother climbed in impetuously. "Didn't expect to see me, did you? Father's going to let me be a deputy, next year! Does the company let you use these roads?"
"This is a state road, Ned; it's as much mine as the company's."
"Gee, I thought they all belonged to the company! What do you know, Pell—Sue's getting married Friday!"
"So I read," rather crudely. "Is he a nice chap?"
"Fine as silk! His father's in the insurance business at Hartford—he has two yachts and an aeroplane—I'm going to visit them next summer——"
"You've gotten thick already, I see. I'm glad she's getting married."
"And what do you suppose!" Ned's eyes grew round and mysterious. "Tom Cole's really dead at last! He got pneumonia, and died in three days. The funeral was in Lilydale—Nell 'n' me went!"
"Nell and I."
"Anyhow, mother sent the most wonderful bunch of white roses you ever saw—all that were growing on the mountain. I helped pick 'em. And we're living in a wonderful big house in Glen Kenmore! Gee, you ought to see it!"
"Old Peter's still on the mountain?"
"Yes, an' he's going to teach me how to fiddle! Father said I could learn."
"Here's your company road, now," as they reached the Fortieth Street gap road. "Give my love to mother and the girls."
Another death occurred, announced by a simple wire to Pelham signed "Grandma." Thoughtfully he pulled out of a desk compartment the slim file, regretting the unanswered note on top. He studied soberly the careful letters, the slight tremble in the curves and capitals. To think that that deep-channeled hand could never form another line!
The Barbour homestead came back to him, a richly scented recollection. His little room, peach-petal sprays rubbing their silken invitation on the rain-specked panes ... the teetering climb on unsteady branches, to the succulent prize just within fingers' reach ... the shaded colonnade of the oak avenue before ... the smell of flowers: pansies and roses, begonias and the white sweetness of magnolia fuscata....
His nose breathed in the memory of the fragrance; and of the indescribably musty odor he associated with old age, a compound of pungent pennyroyal pillows, of kerosene, which grandfather always rubbed in his hands to warn off the mosquitoes, of lavender and rose leaves in sachet pads on the bureau.... A scent unmistakable, anciently sweet. All day his office was full of it.
He took the telegram home to Jane at supper. They were staying at the Andersons', until their own home, a small two-story house on Haviland Avenue, was ready to accept them.
Jane reread the brief message. "Of course, we'll both go, Pelham. I'd wanted so to meet your grandfather! He meant so much to you...."
"I thought we could go this spring to see them...."
He stopped with Jane at the Jackson Hotel, over-shadowed now by the new Lomax House; although Uncle Derrell had long ago sold his interest, to move out on the Greenville Road. Alf Barbour, who had been elected to the legislature, was as glad to see him as his uncle and aunt; and Lil, who had been married two years, proudly displayed her fat six-months-old bundle of joy for Jane's appreciation. These were all Barbours, Pelham thought in curious detachment, as he was; he was at home with them. He imagined the cold formality of Pratt Judson's big house, and rejoiced again at the kinder heritage predominant in his own blood.
Why, the grandparents had been almost a second father and mother to him. Undisturbed he went through the old house again—Paul was stopping at Pratt's—reliving the old days; grandmother's dear frail hands clutched tremulously at his sleeve. "You were always such a comfort to him, Pell...."
She fell in love with Jane, too. The girl set herself out to be sweet and considerate—to say nothing that might jar or ruffle the kindly unprogressiveness of the people.
"You have a lovely wife, Pell; like one of the Barbours," grandmother whispered lovingly.
When he repeated this to Jane, she answered, "And that is her highest praise.... It means a lot to me."
At the graveyard, his mother's black figure stumbled heavily beside her husband's stiff preoccupation. Son and father did not look once at each other; there was no recognition. But Mary came over beside her brother, and his quietly sobbing family, and held Pelham to her breast. "Mother's own big boy.... He was always so fond of you."
Then she did an unexpected thing. With a quick motion she turned to the younger woman beside him, and kissed her cheek. "I pray God you make my son happy," she whispered. "May he never be unhappy...." She cast a half-broken look back to where she had been. Sobbing heavily, she left them.
The slow echoes of "The Sweet By-and-By" ceased; the simple service ended. The horses stepped down the dirt road to their next task. Jane packed to return on the morning train.
Pelham, in answer to Uncle Jimmy Barbour's questions, went into a restrained discussion of his new beliefs.
"I don't understand all about socialism," the uncle finally decided, "but it seems to be, as you say, for the brotherhood of man. And surely that is following in the Master's footsteps."
"And I know Mary's boy wouldn't do anything we could be ashamed of," said Aunt Lotta, in soft certainty.
The simple trust moved him.
As he was leaving, Pelham took his aunt aside. "Don't let grandmother worry too much over—it," he said softly. "It's all so beautiful, and natural. If you believe in a heaven, you know he is happier there than here. Just as flowers blossom and die, just as the leaves stretch out their green leaves and then grow bare under winter skies, grow old, and die, while their place is taken by the younger saplings—it is all natural, and beautiful. We wouldn't want an endless day, or an eternal spring; there must come night and winter, that the new blossoming may follow."
"It is a lovely idea," Aunt Lotta said brokenly. "It will comfort mother."
Then he and Jane turned north again, to take up the unfinished labors at Adamsville—the hazard of losing the strike, and the delight of building their home together.