Pelham did not answer, an ugly surge of anger up-boiling within him.
"It won't do for Hollis and Ned. It isn't decent. They're bound to imagine you are keeping bad company—of both sexes——"
The wrath boiled over. "Father! You know I've been busy speaking—last night was the debate—you know I've been busy——"
His father's mouth closed to a thin line, then opened. "I can't have it. They don't know what you do with your time; I am glad of that. You'll have to leave the mountain."
Pelham stood his ground against the menacing stare. "I shall be glad to." There was a blank wrench of anguish within him, at the thought of leaving the familiar home; the mere difficulties of moving and settling again loomed mountain-high. "Your suggestion that I am going with bad companions is trash, and you know it." He hesitated, then drove on. "I'll leave by Saturday."
Paul turned away. "It will be a good thing."
His soul stinging with the father's injustice, he waited until the other had gone in leisurely certainty down the hill, and went in to his mother. "I'm to leave the mountain next Saturday, mother."
"It's necessary, Pelham. You have distressed your father in so many ways, I cannot see anything else for you to do."
Hurt pride spoke within him. "He said my late hours set a bad example for the boys."
"Yes ... that too...."
The words crowded out. "He said that I was late because I was going with bad companions, when he knows that's a lie!"
"Pelham, you shall not speak that way of your father to me."
"Mother, you know I've been at meetings and debates; you know how straight I've been. If he'd had his way, I wouldn't have been," he added with heated significance.
"What do you mean?" The unrehearsed query came against her will.
"When I was visiting at the Meades, he advised me to go to Butler's Avenue, mother—to go to the Red Light district—to go to the women there. That was his fatherly advice to me!"
Her face assumed a Puritanic severity, an alien look; she masked the tumult of her heart with this outward symbol of incredulity. "I cannot believe you, Pelham."
This was not the first occasion in which he had detected Mary's mobile features solidified into a harsh and unreasoning insensibility to fact. Whenever he or one of the other children had cornered the mother into a situation demanding condemnation of Paul, this self-gorgonized expression hardened upon her; it hid any admission of surprise, any criticism of the husband, for the moment. And he had observed that it served a second function—persisted in, it gave time for the breach in the confidence in Paul to heal without apparent scar; henceforth she seemed to live in the self-imposed delusion that her husband had never been at fault. She would have held as a model wife the Red Queen, who had trained herself to believe six impossible things—presumably to her royal husband's advantage—before each breakfast.
Pelham had come to despise this obvious scouting of reality, this sentimentalizing which called facts what it would have them, not what they were. He retorted rather sharply, "There's no use not believing me. You know I am not lying; those were my father's words."
The smug overcast of unbelief became glacial; in serene security in her husband's impeccability, no matter what the facts might be, she turned toward the house. "I do not wish to have you discuss the matter any further." Then, a softer look in her eyes, she came back to where the son stood, and slipped an arm around his shoulder. "I'm doing this for your own best interest, mother's dearest boy; just as your father has decided in his wisdom that the time has come when you must leave the cottage."
There was a preliminary catch in her voice, affectionate, affecting, and not consciously affected. "God only knows, my son, how much I love you...." She did not say any more, as if with a moment's clarity of insight she doubted the appropriateness of the inevitable formula. She threw a half-puzzled glance at him, that seemed rather to survey herself through him, as she left off talking, passed up the steps, and through the screen door—for all the world as if to screen herself further from his, and perhaps her own, searching scrutiny.
Well, that was ended. Pelham prepared to move. He found a vacant room with Mrs. Hernandez, wife of a comrade. The outlook on symmetrical suburban homes, in a cheap section near the mountain's foot, was far different from the rolling vistas he had been so fond of; but at least his books and Sheff pictures reminded of the old place.
Jim Hewin, whose attentions to Diana continued, although without his first impetuous insistence, questioned the girl about the matter on one of their infrequent meetings under the dumb oaks on the crest. "Young Judson left home?"
"Last week."
"Squabbled with his old man?"
"I reckon so.... He just left." She continued listlessly to stare at the burning breath of the far furnaces.
At length her moping could not be ignored. "What's the matter, gal? What's on your mind?" He tried lightly to shake her out of her melancholy.
She responded weakly to his clumsy friendliness, her tongue locked as to its real trouble. She had come to-night to tell him; it seemed so easy, as she went over the matter in the cleared kitchen, waiting for the supper preparations to begin. She must tell him; he was entitled to know.
And now an icy self-disgust tied her. This man at her side—what could it mean to him, but a new peg for his obscene jokes? She had gone into this thing, at the last, willingly; she must see it through. It was not for him to guess at the faint unstirring life which her mad yielding had summoned within her.
She pretended to meet his mood, and left him sure that she had "got out of her spell." She cried herself and her hidden secret to sleep.
A spirit of lassitude lay over the mountain activities, with the departure of Pelham and the cumulative effect of drenched days of torrid July sunshine. The dusty mornings were dry and crackly, the sullen summer air clung within the house at night. Futile breezes spurted uncertainly, emphasizing the arid discomfort. Twice thunder clouds massed over the nervous swelter, but were swept on before they could spill their desired comfort. Dust-weighted leaves hung limp, shrubs sickened and browned; only the weeds pushed blatantly upward.
Paul came out early the second day of the spell. The weight of the weather was unbearable. It was as if heavy blankets of heat were continually drifting down from the blazing heaven, too piercingly hot to be drowsy; it was as if he walked through these thick palpable layers of living, seering fire ... like walking undersea of a vast liquid ocean of seething heat.
"You'd better get out of this," he announced shortly to Mary. "How would the Thousand Islands do?... The girls, and Ned too; his school doesn't open till late in September. Hollis had better stay with me; I need some help.... Shall I make reservations for Tuesday?"
Paul took Hollis with him, ten days later, for a run up to Washington connected with the delivery of steel to supply Allied orders, a mission in which all of his driving sympathies were enlisted. Nor was he out of key with his home city in this. Adamsville was one of the few Southern cities whose sympathies had been against the Central Powers from the beginning of the war. For the first two years the rest of the South fussed and thundered against English interference with the profitable pre-war cotton trade with Germany; an anti-English "freedom of the seas" became the day's slogan in the one section of the country where English blood still predominated. But the iron city never joined in this clamor; its spokesmen, its suave senators and publicists, could waive the blockaded deflection of cotton, when the iron and steel demands of the Entente doubled the output of the mineral region. As the warring months marched on, quick shipments commanded untold bonuses; as of old, where a man's purse was, there was his heart. For commercial and patriotic reasons the company fretted impotently at the continuance of the strike at this time, especially when rail congestion became serious throughout the country. Paul's trip was one of many that the metal magnates had to make, to keep the wheels running as smoothly as possible upon the twice interrupted tracks.
This trip left the mountain home in the care of old Peter, who stayed on in his cluttered servant's room behind the kitchen. Diana Cole came in to clean up once or twice a week. Jim Hewin's persistent curiosity about the movements of the Judsons found full answer in her.
Two days after the master's departure, Peter hitched up and drove into town, to bring out two boxes of books from the office, and some sacks of cotton seed meal and oats. He dawdled around from store to store, showing off his temporary responsibility and dignity. The hot hours passed; he found relief in the cool shade of a side of the ice factory, where frequent squabbles among intent young negro crap-shooters were referred to him for his ponderous adjustments.
Diana, late in the afternoon, brought a pan of peas out to the mended yellow rocker on the front porch of the Cole shack, and commenced popping the viscid spheres out of the parched pods. At length her hands slowed; she stared into the red sunset beyond Hillcrest Cottage on the hill across.
She was struck by the odd reflection of the fiery glow in the kitchen windows. It was as if the late sun shone clear through the house. She rose agitatedly to her feet, the peas littering the steps, the pan halting against the wilted morning-glory vines. "Maw!" she cried, panic in her voice. "Maw! Will! Come here——"
A thin shimmer of smoke jerked restlessly above the kitchen end of the big house. "That ain't—fire?"
"An' Mr. Paul an' ev'ybody gone!"
"Will," she turned hurriedly, "run to Hewintown—the men can save lots. I'll phone the Fire Department——"
She raced up the familiar road, her mind working feverishly. Far behind Stella panted. There had been no fire in the kitchen range since morning, when Peter cooked his own bacon and coffee. At noon it had been cold; she had seen it; Peter had started then for town.... Unless he had come back.
The sun had almost gone down; it was dark in the hall. She threw open the doors, and started frantically tugging at Miss' Mary's chiffonier and washstand. The men arrived, coatless, willing. They piled furniture around the big cedar north of the house. The heat of this burning wing became blistering; the things had to be moved down the road.
Diana remembered the telephoning.
"We got an alarm," a gruff voice scolded. "Engines ought to be there now."
Two neighbors from the base of the mountain came up, and began helping. Armed guards at the entrances to the estate kept many away; these watched the holocaust from beyond the gap, or from their own homes. Dried wooden walls flamed up against the dark sky like giant fireworks; massed smoke bellied and spit sparks as if the mountain vomited in fiery discomfort.
Someone led a group of helpers up to the dim door of the garret, crowded with carefully covered family treasures from Jackson days. The dusty packing-cases promised little. "Nothing here," he said, closing the door.
The north end was an oven now; the rescuers turned to the dining room, parlors, and the boys' rooms on the south.
Diana ran back to the closet where Miss' Mary's silver was locked. She left this to hurry to the window, and then the door.
Huggins, Jim Hewin, and a knot of guards stared at the hectic activity. "Hey, niggers," one called to Will Cole and another, who were steering the hall clock from the Jackson home through the door, "drop that clock. You can't steal Mr. Judson's things."
Will and the other reached the porch.
"Drop it, I say," rang out Jim's ugly voice, as he balanced his pistol tentatively. "You bastards, burnin' down the house, to steal the stuff!"
"That's a lie," Will called, shortly. Others took up the cry.
The guards raised menacing pistols.
A striker, his temper on fire from continuing irritations, dropped behind the nearest steps, levelled his pistol, and shot toward the armed group.
Diana ran out flying, shielding Will. "Don't shoot my brother, you scoundrels——"
Jim's pistol, carefully aimed at the black striker, crackled viciously. Tongues of flame spoke from the armed deputies.
"You plugged the gal," Huggins grinned casually, aiming again. "We got both coons."
The astounded citizens ran between the sudden murderous combatants. "This won't do!"
"The house is burning, while you're killing each other!"
The chemical engine swung around the southern curve of the road, jetting ineffectually against the greedy insanity of the flames. The strikers took up the four bodies, and carried them somberly to Hewintown, Stella Cole following, dry-eyed and shivering with uncomprehending hatred.
Pelham and Jane walked among the smouldering ruins the next day, their hearts bitter at the headlines which blamed the strikers for the burning. "There's no dirtiness they won't stoop to," he raged. "Hanging's too good for those editors."
When Paul Judson arrived, to what had been home, in answer to Mr. Kane's wire, it was to find that Tom Hewin, whose sub-contract still controlled this part of the estate, had begun removing the rich outcrop where the north end of the cottage had rested.
"This is outrageous, Hewin! We don't want this touched——"
"It's the contract, Mr. Judson. In section seven. I supposed——"
Paul left him, agonized at heart.
An injunction the next day stopped the theft of the outcrop, and removed the Hewins from their connection with the property and the strike.
Only Ed was left to his mother to arrange for the burial of Diana and Will. Neither of them knew, although Stella suspected, that there were three dead in the two graves.
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 oflilasthat 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.
"What do you think ofthat, comrade Judson?" Mrs. Hernandez asked, pushing the morning paper over, and watching his expression closely.
The first sheet of theTimes-Dispatchheld a page-wide display headline, concerning a dynamiting conspiracy unearthed among the leaders of the strike. With furious amazement Pelham read of the finding of a bundle of the explosive sticks on the tracks just before a trainload of workers was to arrive, and of a heavy charge, its fuse lit, in an upper opening of the second ramp. Company guards, he read, had testified to seeing four strikers sneak down the gap, away from the entry. Wilson, Jensen, and two other active agitators were already in jail; other arrests were to follow. A two column editorial bitterly assailed the "un-American" laborers, and demanded the militia to end the reign of terror.
"It's a plant, I'm sure. They're aching for an excuse to bring on the soldiers."
"They got four of the boys," she reminded him.
"It's outrageous."
He hurried around to the strike headquarters. Ben Spence, Dawson, McGue, and four others broke off their tense discussion as he entered.
"Why didn't you phone me about this?"
Spence answered, his tone not too friendly. "Couldn't find you."
"We haven't seen you for a week, Mr. Judson," blared out Dawson. "We been readin' the social news, too. You've been busy."
"Yes.... I've been busy on my report." A flash of his father's acidity spoke in the tones. Then he asked more quietly, "What about bonds?"
"You can help there," Spence mollified him. "We've got most of 'em arranged for. When will your report go up?"
Pelham twisted forward on his chair. "It'll contain this latest plant. I'll finish this week. I suspected something of the kind." He told them of the offer made by Jim Hewin.
"It's an old stunt," said Dawson, unbending a little from his suspicion of "white-collar" meddling in labor troubles. "They ought to be ashamed to pull such stale gags. But here in the South——Those blackguardly uglies will swear any of us into jail."
"There's the jury," said Spence, a fighting flash in his eyes. "We can play a trick or two. Corporations ain't popular in Adamsville. Well, we'll get the boys out first."
The whole thing brought Pelham up sharply to his neglected work. He got one more maddeningly brief sight of Louise, before she continued her round of visits. "I'll be back, lover boy, around the holidays."
"How can I stand your being away?"
But the Tollivers were too close to permit his saying more.
Nursing his unsettling sense of guilt, until he was sure his face must publish the amorous errancy, he took himself to Jane on the accustomed Friday evening. She had not marked his absences, accepting the explanation that the report had kept him busied. To his wonderment, she was as dear and essentially desirable as ever; her range of attractiveness lay in ways so remote from Louise's red and feverish charm, that he sensed no conflict between them; he could love both wholly for their differing appeals.
Yet the evening was different, to him. The memory of intimate contacts with the brief love who had gone left a mental stigma upon his body; he was less willing than ever to touch Jane, or think of kissing her; she must be kept all the more congealed in icy protection. As defense against unnerving personal confidences, he had brought his report, which had begun to trouble him, to ask her help and counsel. "I'm afraid of it, Jane. You see, it goes all the way ... about my own father. It'll be bound to make trouble for him ... and me. I could have another inspector frame the final wording——"
"You back out! You must be a changeling some corporation elf has dumped off on me!"
"Don't tease. The thing bites too hard; it has nothing but teeth."
"Of course you'll make it! Give it here; we'll fix it so that it can masticate the toughest corporation board. What if it does make trouble? It's the truth...."
She went over the whole of it, toning down the vituperative rhetoric of the opening and conclusion, adding force to his presentation of facts. He was startled at her ability to vivify the abstractions symbolizing the red rage tearing apart city and mountain. Before she was done, he was re-converted to faith in his eloquent accusations.
At length it was finished. He saw that advance copies reached the papers on the day it was received by the governor. TheAdvertiserand theTimes-Dispatchdid not even mention it. But the ever-helpfulRegistermore than made up for their censoring. The slashing indictment of the companies for their disregard of the protective laws, the startling story of their lobbies to defeat safety measures, even the account of his father's activity at the State Federation of Labor, with the advertisements in theVoice of Laboras exhibits, were given in full. This was a new frankness in Adamsville politics. From this Pelham passed to a treatment of starvation wages on the one hand, and prodigal salaries, surpluses and dividends on the other. He featured that the strike was for the enforcement of existing laws, and that the companies refused any arbitration. The conclusion recommended that the state enforce arbitration, or, if the companies could not be controlled, that the profiteering be ended by the state's taking over the mines and running them.
The lonely editorial voice of theRegisterbacked up even the most radical demands of the document.
The answer of the companies came promptly. Both of the other papers broke silence by denouncing the report as dishonest propaganda, with a demand for the removal of the offending young hothead. They called again for the militia to end the disorder at the mines.
Pelham received a wire from Governor Tennant the same night, suspending him from the state's services under charges of misconduct in office. The two hostile papers gave the details, the next morning; his strike activities were set forth, and given as reasons for his dismissal.
"You'll get your hearing," Ben Spence told him, "but that'll be all. It's good-bye with you, my boy. And you've drawn just two pay checks!"
His father descended on him in proxy during the afternoon, in the person of Pratt Judson, who had run up from Jackson, at Paul's suggestion, after interviewing the governor, to act as intermediary. Pelham listened with ill grace to his uncle's suave attempts to cloud the matter.
"Bob Tennant is a friend of yours, as well as mine, Pelham. It would certainly hurt him to remove you; but what is he to do?"
"Does my father demand the removal?"
"You know better. He stood up for you, even against the whole board of directors. Family means a lot to Paul. But they're out for your scalp. You've played yourself into their hands."
"I don't see how," the boy repeated doggedly, curving a steel-edged ruler until it cracked alarmingly. "I don't see how."
"If you'd gotten anyone's advice, my boy, you would know that a state official can't take sides in such matters. You've actually served on the strike committees, haven't you?"
"Heretofore inspectors haven't failed to serve the companies. They weren't fired."
"Let's not beat around the bush. Here's the best that Tennant can do. The charges need never come up, if you don't kick up another row. The suspension can go for the present, and then in due course you can resign. Mary tells me you've wanted to take up advanced work in sociology. You know I'm not a rich man, Pelham; but I'll be willing, to pull you out of this hole, to stand the whole expense."
"Would you advise me to retreat under fire? Resign, with charges hanging over me?"
The portly uncle thought a minute. "They'll be withdrawn now, Pelham, if you'll agree to resign in six months, and take a vacation until then. There'll be nothing against you."
The ruler splintered abruptly, littering the ordered desk. "It's running away from a fight, Uncle Pratt, and you know it. I can't do it."
"Think of the family—a black mark like this——"
"I'm thinking of the miners ... of my duty to them and the people."
"We're practical men, Pelham. You know enough about politics to know that you're butting your head against a stone mountain."
"Then I'll butt, damn 'em! Talk straight, Uncle Pratt. Would you advise me to back out of a fight in the middle of it?"
The elder man grinned in defeated sympathy. "You're a young fool, Pelham. We've got to do this quickly, or it's too late. I could give you until to-morrow to think it over——"
"I don't need the time. This is the only answer I could make."
"Well, I'll tell Paul. If you ever get into a scrape of any kind——"
"I appreciate that, and I'll remember it."
The strike committee heard what had occurred within an hour, as far as Pelham's decision was concerned.
"Good boy!" said Spence. "Give 'em a run for their dirty money."
Serrano, an unofficial member of the group, broke in excitedly. "Why not run Judson as labor candidate for sheriff, and elect him? That's the best answer to make to the crooks! You'd run, wouldn't you?"
Pelham thought rapidly. It would at least give a wonderful chance for propaganda, even if they couldn't overcome the big odds against them. "I don't think we could win——"
"Win? We'd lick the lights out of 'em! Man, Adamsville's waking up! With the strike going on, you could beat out Dick Sumter hands down! Look how he's turned the sheriff's office over to the companies! Will you do it?"
There might be something in it; his heart expanded sharply from the excitement. He kept his voice level. "I'd be willing to, of course. What do you think of it, Ben?"
The cautious labor lawyer was not so enthusiastic. "You might do it, Judson. You'd have to have union labor entirely behind you——"
"We can make 'em endorse him!"
"Socialist and all?" quizzed Spence, smiling doubtfully.
"Sure! Think what it would mean to the strike, if we had the sheriff's office! We could enforce order then.... They'd have no chance to call out their brass-buttoned Willies."
"Well, it's a big chance."
The hearing at Jackson, the next week, was the cut-and-dried farce that Pratt Judson and Spence had predicted. The governor was friendly but firm. "It's my duty, Mr. Judson, as a servant of all the people, to remove you."
Jane, on fire with the idea of the campaign, caught his hand impulsively when he hurried back to tell her. "Don't mind it. We knew what they would do.... Now—show them!"
The thing moved slowly. There were countless obstacles. Pooley, Bowden, the regular machine, would not hear of it. An uproarious meeting of the Trade Council shoved through an endorsement. The leaders changed their talk then, but Pelham felt their hidden antipathy working against him. So far there had been no open announcement of the race, and it was now the last week of August.
"Ben Spence, you've got to put this thing over. Hire Arlington Hall—the socialist local will put up the money—and start it next Sunday afternoon."
"Hadn't we better wait until things are straightened out a bit——"
"We'll wait until election's over, then. We've waited three weeks now."
"All right. Dawson says he'll back you; he's worth a lot."
Then began first-hand knowledge of the detail of politics for Pelham. Even before the announcement meeting, the socialist local, in its haphazard groping for democracy, selected a committee to steer the campaign. They met in Pelham's office the next night.
Pelham mused over their faces, as they blundered down to business. Surely the most extraordinary group ever assembled to direct the political destinies of Adamsville! Serrano, a bricklayer, a loud voiced, commanding bulk of a man, who banged with the improvised gavel; Christopher Duckworth, pioneer in the Adamsville movement, an impecunious old architect who had had his name on the state ticket at every election for sixteen years; two machinists, fighting units of a fighting group, "Mule" Hinton and Henry Gup; the party's state secretary, Mrs. Ola Spigner, who had come up from her farm in Choctaw County, ever on hand for a fight; Phifer Craft, a failure as a commission merchant, and a deep theoretical student of Marx and Dietzgen; Abe Katz, spokesman of the tailors' union and the Arbeiter Ring; and his landlady, Mrs. Hernandez, invariable woman member on committees. They were not even leaders in their trades, except Serrano and perhaps Katz. Most were poor speakers or spoke not at all. But out of the ill-lit slums and lean cheap suburbs they had been flung together by a burning idealism for a greater world. They were the hands of a people's groping faith.
"I mofe we elect us a treasurer," said Abe Katz seriously. So began the business of the campaign.
Dawson, Ben Spence, even Bowden and the Bivens group dropped in at occasional meetings; but this faithful nucleus was always on hand, doing the real work. They mapped out the itinerary of speakers, got out the first literature, sent soliciting committees to the various unions for endorsement and funds, in fact directed the whole campaign.
Any of the comrades were willing to be broken in as chairmen of the meetings. The speaking at first fell heavily on Serrano, Duckworth, and Pelham himself; but gradually the liberal element of the city came into the fight. Dr. Gulley threw the support of his Free Congregation into the contest with the "County Ring," as represented by Sumter; near-radical lawyers, Will Tatum, Judge Deason, Harvey Cade, eager to oust the corporation toadies, were invaluable assistants; Lane Cullom's car was always at the call of the committee, and shared with Pelham's the duty of touring the rambling county roads to the further meetings.
The unique campaign drew crowds from the start. One night Pelham called for a show of hands of all the men present who were voters; the result was so astonishing, that he repeated the lesson again and again. In West Adamsville, filled with itinerant furnace workers, not one man in fifteen was a voter. In the country districts, about one in ten; in the city, slightly less. With the aid of Ben Spence, he looked up the question, and thereafter added a vigorous attack on the election laws to his onslaughts on the company-owned sheriff's office.
"Do you know what your servants down in Jackson did in 1902, when they framed the new Constitution? They told you it would take the vote from 'the niggers'; it took the vote from you white men as well. In New York, in Illinois, in most of the northern and eastern states, from eighteen to twenty-two per cent of the population vote; in Western suffrage states, up to thirty-five per cent. And in the South? Georgia has something like five per cent, this state four, and Mississippi only three and a half per cent! Half of the men in this state are white; six out of every ten of these have been disfranchised by that Constitution. The cumulative poll tax, which says you can't vote unless every poll tax since 1902 has been paid by the February before the election, the grandfather clause, giving votes to the southern slave-masters and not to the southern wage-slaves who make the state's wealth now, these have robbed you of your voice in the government. The southern laborer has been classed with children, women, negroes, and idiots—will you stand for it?"
The campaign, thanks to theRegister'shearty support, began to alarm the politicians. Pat Donohoo, who controlled five saloons, and claimed to be able to deliver the Irish and Catholic vote, came in to see Pelham. "We know your father," he confided huskily. "Give me your word that you'll behave when you're elected, and I'll see that you get every Catholic and Irish vote in the county. We're out to teach Dick Sumter a lesson."
Pelham answered briskly. "Of course I'll behave. My platform says what I'll do, Donohoo. If your men want to vote for me, go to it. They'll get a square deal from me, I'll promise that."
"You see," he explained to the committee, "he's playing safe. No matter who's elected, he can claim the credit."
"Never trust them Catholics," said Mrs. Spigner, a devout propagandist for theMenace. "They're all Jesuits."
"He couldn't deliver anyhow," consoled Ben Spence.
The crafty lawyer made the labor support fairly solid, by promising liberal appointments to the State Federation crowd. Pelham did not know about this, and Spence did not imagine that the promises would have to be fulfilled.
For one of the meetings the candidate worked harder than usual. It had been old Duckworth's suggestion that a speaking be advertised for the corner across from the University Club, in the very heart of the "silk-stocking" district. The neighborhood was liberally posted, and the committee were on hand to cover the retreat of the speakers, if too much of a riot developed. To their surprise, the large crowd listened to Dr. Gulley's fervent appeals, to the withering sarcasm of Harvey Cade, and to Judson's vitriolic attack on the leisure class, with close and appreciative attention. One or two of the East Highlands boys hooted a few times, but a policeman routed them. The applause was as hearty here as at Hazelton or Irondale.
Pelham's opponent stirred himself tardily, and was careful not to answer the accurate broadside of charges flung at him by the deposed mining inspector. General attacks on socialism were much more popular than lame apologies for an unfair and one-sided administration; and the common charge that American socialism was pro-German was roared and ballyhooed by the political servants of the corporations, upon platforms opulently framed in bunting. Pelham laughed at this intense patriotism, suddenly discovered as an answer to the sheriff's anti-labor activities; but it made continual inroads upon his strength with the docile people. The tide wavered to and fro; theRegisterclaimed four days before election that Judson's chances were better than even; the alarmed opposing sheets insisted that there was only one man in the race, and that the iron city would never tolerate a man who openly advocated free love, kaiserism, and the despotism of the mob.
The closing rally of the Democrats came on Saturday night, an old-fashioned whooping wind-up in the Lyric theater; Pelham covered five county meetings and two city ones during the same time. Monday night, while the opposing forces rested their public activities, occurred the Judson finale, at Main Park, in the rickety summer band-stand. The trampled green in the open heart of the city was black with intent and serious faces, whose throats cheered themselves hoarse over the hoarsened voice of their leader,—though his tones, roughened by night after night of straining open-air talking, could barely reach half of his crowd.
The final applause was given; the reporters rushed off with their copy; the squads of comrades and union men left with their wives and children for cheap scattered homes. Pelham took Jane back to the Andersons', to sit, glum and wholly exhausted, slumped against the back of the couch, until after two.
"Never mind, you dear old fighter," she insisted. "You've done more than anyone else could."
Tuesday, election day, was a hectic tumult of excitement for both sides. Lane Cullom insisted on driving Pelham in his car, proud of the reflected light that went to the faithful aid of the candidate. The relief of shooting along chill stretches of November road from polling-place to polling-place was indescribable.
At five the polls closed. Pelham, after a lunch-stand supper, sat in his half-dismantled headquarters, his finger upon the pulse of the wires that led to every part of the county.
The returns began. One by one the faithful precincts lifted Judson to a good lead, and increased it. Hazelton, West Adamsville, distant Coalstock, the mining boxes, all went well, more than neutralizing the early farming returns, which were four to one for Sumter. And then the totals grew evener, and wavered now one way, now another. The vocal vote was Judson's; the silent, unchangeable Democratic mass began to lend its weight to the incumbent. There was still a fighting chance. Counting at the city boxes proceeded with sickening slowness.
The last of the county returns was wired from distant Chinaberry Junction: Judson led by fifty-two votes! If the city had broken even, he would have it!
The jubilant comrades and strikers conscripted sudden parades of celebration; the corporations were licked! It would paralyze the companies to have the law-enforcers, their oldtime bulwark, turned against them!
Then, as if at the touch of a single lever, the thirteen big city boxes unloosed their flood of figures. First ward, Sumter, a hundred lead; eleventh, Sumter three hundred ahead; ninth, Sumter, two hundred more; fifth, eight hundred and eighty to the good for Sumter—this was the Highlands ward; not one lone box tallying for Judson. Within twenty minutes, enough of the returns were in to convince Pelham that the citizens of Bragg County had spoken in their freeborn majesty, and had chosen Richard Sumter sheriff by a majority of almost two to one.
The morning papers gave the corrected figures—8,450 to 4,281. The corporations still held the court house.
"It's really a victory," Mrs. Spigner, the state secretary, repeated with cheerless optimism, as Pelham drove her to the early mail train for Choctaw County. "You raised a socialist vote of six hundred something like six hundred per cent. You impatient youngsters, who think one election has any importance! Remember, comrade, it's all a part of the class struggle!"
At the end of a day of fatiguing post mortems and loquacious consolations, of noisy assurances that he had won, punctuating his dismemberment of the decapitated headquarters, he sought his real inspiriter, Jane. The city lay under a shimmer of thin November sunshine, that woke to dusky gold the tawny leaves flickering, at the chilly breeze's lash, upon motionless black boughs—that revealed pitilessly the feathery plumes of golden rod reaching over the sidewalk from the vacant lot beyond Andersons', plumes the season's slow alchemy had transmuted to insubstantial silver fragility, sifting into the reddish mold at the fingering of the spurts of ground wind. Pelham would have preferred a drizzling, cloud-heavy night sky, in which the decrepit cheerfulness of the late landscape, and he himself, could have been decently shrouded in isolating obscurity.
Jane gave him both her hands as he mounted the last step, reading, in the drawn corners of his mouth, and the heaviness beneath his eyes, the half-raised signals of surrender.
There was a flavor of bitterness in his first words. "It was really a victory, after all——"
"You've heard that enough to-day, I know. Don't try to talk: here, these cushions——" slipping them easily under his head, as a firm hand upon his shoulder soothed his protest. "Let yourself relax, all over. There."
Her eyes meditated between one of the chairs and the end of the couch beside him. She sat upon the couch.
The drowsy stillness, the moment's remoteness from the iron affairs of the racking city, the soft rustle of her dress, the gentle eddies of air that seemed scented by her presence, lulled and comforted. He reached for her hand, and laid it against his cheek, where it loitered, a cool solace, a gradual masterer of his undirected fancies.
The hours sagged by. There was little talk; that could wait. Not of his willing his mind began to embroider the miserly store of caresses he had asked or received from Jane; one by one the feverish moments with the other girl, purged into a less bodily ecstasy, recurred to him, with his own love's face and form holding their rightful place in his arms—translated memories which in their turn were embellished by a drugged imagination into warmer visionings of mutual surrender. Attempts to re-channel his thinking were unsuccessful; at last he let the wanton heart have its way.
Never had he needed a mother as now, Jane felt, as she bent her energy toward his tired spirit. He needed more than a mother; his feverish driving unrest would quiet, in arms that held him closer than a mother's might. The time had come for her to be mother to him, and something else. Winner or not, he was a hearty fighter ... decent.... Jane Lauderdale Judson ... the name meant something now; she had helped it mean something. A tired boy; her tired boy....
He looked up into her face at last. Her eyes, radiant with unspoken caresses, were a madonna's ... twin stars over a fretted sea; twin stars, in a heaven so near that he could reach and touch it. Unsteadied, he swung painfully to a seat beside her. Then, compelled by her dominant eyes, he turned and faced her in the shadowy hush. Unsteadily he put out his two arms, touching her lightly, fearfully, upon the shoulders, and lingering there. The pressure of his fingers drew her toward him; a pressure from no visible fingers pushed him inexorably toward her. He felt her breast touch him softly, and settle contentedly against him. He pressed his flushed face against the soft neck and the tendrils of her hair; his lips lay against her flesh, although he did not dare move them.
There was an unhurried rapture of stirless content. Half solaced for the moment, he released her; but his eyes could not leave hers, nor his face move far from her own.
Her clear voice came to him quietly, with the mellow reverberations of a gong touched in dusky stillness. "Stupid...." He could not read the half-closed eyes; he had to lean closer to make out the words. "Is that all?... Must I ask you?..."
His lips touched hers, closed upon them, clung there. A giddy faintness came with the long-withheld ardor; his eyes shut out sight, the other senses ceased for the moment—the frantic remnant of his will and consciousness seeking to make the moment perpetual. His own being seemed to flow out and into the other, he seemed to absorb from the vital contact all of the inestimable dearness that she meant to him. This consummation, devoutly unwished for so long, was for that reason in its realization doubly dear; it brought an ecstasy so brimming that for the time no other sensation found space to obtrude.
Too soon, to his heart, the ecstatic eternity ended. Suddenly ashamed of her daring in permitting the tardy rapture, not to think of inviting it, Jane drew back, releasing her tingling lips into a prim pucker of uncertainty. He sought her a second time, quickened to an arrogant sense of ownership of intangible wonders. Her protest reached him: "We shouldn't, Pelham dear...."
She found her lips too busied to frame more negative commandments, despite her unevenly ebbing struggles of protest.
At length his sense of protection returned; dizzily he leaned back, unstrung, and yet satisfied. The night noises pulsed a rhythm fuller, more harmoniously triumphant with soft surges of loving certainty, than he had ever felt; the pandering darkness was intimate and confidential. With the slowing of the unleashed leap of his blood, recollections of Louise Richard came, as he had once feared; but there was no conflict, no sense of soilure, in the unreal, remote fantasy of the former passion; only a sun-high glory and delight in this, as if the first had been the needed soil in which the plant of love could grow toward fulfillment.
Her ears caught his contented whisper. "What are a thousand defeats, Jane ... loved one ... when there is this at the end of the way?"
"At the beginning of our new way," she amended with sober joy.
"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."
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 theVoice 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.
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.