Mountain Part 40

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 cus.h.i.+ons----" 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 br.i.m.m.i.n.g that for the time no other sensation found s.p.a.ce 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 owners.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sion; 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."

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 s.h.i.+ngles.

Then a day of thaw, deepening the roads into a cold slus.h.i.+ness; 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 pa.s.sed 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 judges.h.i.+p 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 sc.r.a.p-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 s.h.i.+ned badge on his coat.