Mountain Part 43

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

Jane settled into Pelham's crescenting arm.

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

"Glorious!"

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

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 sh.e.l.l, 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 fis.h.i.+ng colony, Deer Island's populous turtle farms, and the lighthouses and dismantled fort upon the sandy spit called s.h.i.+p Island. Here they walked a beach littered with curled conchs, horseshoe crab sh.e.l.ls, and debris from the deeper waters washed up for a gla.s.sy-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 s.p.a.ces 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 pa.s.sionate 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 G.o.d 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 relations.h.i.+p.

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 fis.h.i.+ng catboats and tarry roping. She curled behind him on a solitary bale of cotton awaiting belated s.h.i.+pment, 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 s.h.i.+elded a lighted match to give new life to the moist brown ma.s.s 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--coa.r.s.e. 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 ent.i.tled 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 hards.h.i.+ps 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 plat.i.tude 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. Phoenicia 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 compet.i.tion; then came selfish cooperation, 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 cooperation--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, s.h.i.+fting 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 cla.s.ses blend into one cla.s.s of worthy men and women----"