"It wipes out all the irks and littlenesses.... Under all our veneer and varnish of culture, business, politics, we are man and woman ... male and female ... our souls as nakedly desirous as were the first two who mated.... Loved one!" It rendered him inarticulate, this delicious stirring up of the hidden deeps. It was for this, he was sure, that men and women had been molded; in this surrender they yielded themselves to the ageless currents of joy-bringing unity that created life, and continued it as life itself.
"I love your hair," she arranged it more to her liking. "It fretted your eyes, that last speech.... I wanted to kiss it away ... then."
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."