Mountain Part 14

The rain exhausted its ammunition during the night; a clear truce followed. The bright green cleanliness of leaves, the reburnished brilliance of golden-glow and flaming canna, showed the hill heartened by the hours of storm.

But there was nothing morning-minded in Pelham's soul, as he irked over the day's details at the mines. All that he had to do seemed mechanical, inconsequential; the planning had been done already--his admirable role was that of a cog, touching off other cogs to their diverse tasks in the vast mechanism that was disemboweling the mountain,--the mothering mountain, that had once been pal and parent to him. Less than a cog, indeed--for the other cogs held him as alien; he could not share their lives nor their thoughts, nor was he one of the final beneficiaries, no matter what the miners might think.

He knew, too, that his father was becoming as alien to him as these miners held that the son was to them. Pelham was wrapped up in the minutiae of the mining; and this was a book in which Paul had covered only the first simple chapters. Again, the son's reading at the northern college, and the intangible outlook acquired there, opened vistas that Paul could not share; and in those matters where the two wills came into direct touch, such as marrying "where money was," and relationship with women, they were pole-distant apart. The son, in his youthful restlessness, was at outs with the whole situation; he was bored with it, as he was with the young concerns of his brothers, the chatter of Nell and Sue, and the immeasurable vapidity of Nellie Tolliver, Lane Cullom, Dorothy Meade, the whole group of Adamsville's stale, unprofitable friends, young and old. There was, of course, his mother ... and the mountain; but she was part and parcel of Paul's existence, too; and the mountain seemed strangely uncommunicative and pa.s.sive, these days, as if waiting for him to make the break, to take an affirmative step needed to quicken his thinking and being.

The insipid promise of the afternoon's fete, for instance--were his days to be an unending vista of such chatter, and trivial preening and strutting of visionless girls and young men? Dorothy offered more than that; yet he was singularly at odds with himself over her. To be burnt by a fire he could not touch: to chain himself, a voluntary Tantalus, before perilous sweets just out of reach--an admirable role! It was in his own hands to end it; and since Paul's advice about Butler's Avenue did not condemn the thing that he shrank from in Dorothy's case, he was repelled by the remembrance that he had ever considered ending the purity that Mary had held him to.

After all, his sisters' fete would be better than that.

But when he had carefully dressed for it, and was immersed in its shallow flippancy, he reacted the other way. Lettuce sandwiches and lemonade!--Good G.o.d! Determined to dodge the rest of it, he sidled around to the garage, and sneaked out his car. When the fresh crest breeze sprayed over his face, he pressed on the accelerator, and only slowed with the turn into the road to the city.

At his arrival before the darkened Meade bungalow, two voices reached him from Dorothy's lit boudoir. His feet sc.r.a.ped slowly up the steps; after two thoughtful feints, he pushed the bell. There was distaste already at what lay before him; life offered no new way out.

"Turn the porch switch, Pelham," Dorothy called from above. "Read the papers.... We'll be down soon."

So she even a.s.sumed his presence!

The swinging door was pushed outward, a short while after he had balanced himself on the extreme edge of the swinging couch. A girl stepped out and walked over to him. He rose conventionally.

"I'm Jane Lauderdale," she said, in a voice of pleasing, bell-like quality. "'Thea told me to amuse you, until she's ready. You are Mr.

Judson?"

As their minds clashed in preliminary conversational skirmishing, some sense of her restful loveliness came to him. It was her eyes that spoke most clearly--those lighted windows in the spirit's comely house. Jane's eyes were a deep, swimming brown, with an effect of largeness and roundness, as if she looked upon the irregular march of the hours with the unfeigned navete of a child--a semblance heightened by a starlike radiance of the eyes themselves and the long shielding eyelashes. They seemed less to stand off and inspect him, than to reach out and envelop him, bringing him within their substance. Despite the difference of shape, they held the same deep liquidity of his mother's eyes.

The whole face, he fancied, was that of a mother--a madonna. The live brown hair was smoothed back from a high forehead, with the simplicity of a Grecian maiden; there was just a hint of pallor in her complexion, whose whisper of lack of health was negatived by glowing cheeks and sparkling face. It was not the typically thin-visaged Italian madonna; it was this sublimated into an ampler shapeliness of feature. The voice was clear and direct, with the lingering overtones of a gong quietly tapped in still dusk. Her presence was restful, comforting, and at the same time embodied an unmistakable challenge to his own nature and worthiness.

The impression of childish navete, he soon found, must not be stretched too far; her vision was astonishingly clear and comprehending, with a definiteness that at times almost amounted to dogmatism.

Her mention of long-time friendship for "'Thea" gave something to inquire about. "You'll be at her table Sat.u.r.day evening?"

"At the club, you mean? I hardly think so," and she smiled softly.

"Don't you dance?"

"Yes.... But not often. To be quite frank, the people one meets at the country club are rather ba.n.a.l ... even Dorothy's friends."

"Thank you! That's a touch. Perhaps you bridge."

"Sometimes I make a fourth; but cards are very easy to get absorbed in, to the point of obsession, don't you think?"

"I suppose so; if you take them that seriously. Are you fond of golf, or tennis?"

A charming precision was in her answers, as if they had been framed before. "Tennis suits the strenuous adolescent; golf, the bay-windowed corporation head. One is behind me; the other I pray never to become. I don't love corporations," she smiled. The smile covered her preliminary judgment; his questions were ba.n.a.l, almost gauche; but what could one expect of a worshiper of Dorothy?

What did the girl like, anyhow? These were sure-fire topics with all the rest Pelham knew.... Perhaps the _Post_, on the table nesting her arm.

"Are you enjoying the latest Chambers' story? I don't think it's up to 'The Danger Mark'--though, of course, Chambers'----"

"I enjoyed part of the opening--you know, the dry-goods inventory--the lingerie part. It's informative: a Sears-Roebuck for the Broadway shops.

But--beyond that!"

"What are you interested in?" Inability to pigeon-hole her among the feminine types he was used to called forth this poverty-stricken directness.

"I'm interested in what you are doing, Mr. Judson, ever since 'Thea mentioned it." Her straightforward eyes lit up for the first time.

"She's done nothing but sing your praises for the last few weeks." He rose in fatuous gracefulness to her opening.

The frank eyes measured him coolly. "What interested me was your work.

You have charge of the mining at your father's place, haven't you?"

A bit dazed by the sudden shift, he told his connection with the management.

Her nod of satisfaction puzzled him. "I've always wanted to learn something of the other half of the story; I know the miners' side, from work with the United Charities. And I've been studying reports, until a sheer excess of wrath made me lay them aside."

What odd reading for a girl! "How did you happen to take that up?"

"Mrs. Anderson has me on her Labor Legislation Committee." She smiled gently, the eyelids nearing one another in unconscious grace. "I tried to interest 'Thea in it; one meeting tired her out."

He had a fleeting vision of volatile Nell or finicky Sue reading a mining report. Evidently this Miss Lauderdale was something of a person. Of course, it wasn't exactly a woman's work, unless her charm earned it as a unique prerogative.

A contented smile lengthened his lips. "We treat our miners pretty well, in this state."

"Yes, that is the general impression. I wonder if you've gone into the matter very thoroughly?" She was coolly critical; he felt a bit shriveled under her friendly gaze. "The South is backward, in some things; but it's waking up. You went to Harvard, didn't you?"

"Yale Sheff."

"Oh, that's better. I have a brother prepping at Laurenceville; he'll go to Sheff or Ma.s.sachusetts Tech."

"Better, you say? Just how?"

"Yale at least talks about democracy." Her phrases were astonishingly direct, her intonations warm and enthusiastic.

"Did you go to college?" Pelham wondered.

She shrugged ever so slightly. "No; a finishing school--Ogontz. Don't mention it, please. Tell me something of your work."

Her leading questions were beginning to reveal his blundering vacuity about labor conditions on the mountain, when Dorothy fluffed out. Her sharp eyes noticed at once his sheepish interest. "Jane's been boring you with a discussion of the labor question, foreign and domestic, I'm sure! I can't convert her. She'll worm everything you know out of you in half an hour, I warn you."

Pelham agreed, a bit chagrined. "Yes.... She was just telling me what I didn't know about my men."

Jane's lips curved open into a smile, friendly and somehow approving.

"You'll learn, I think."

Dorothy yawned in intimate boredom, "An apt pupil, no doubt.... I thought this was the day of the great fete, Pelham."

"It is," he smiled. "They are at this moment enjoying lemonade and lettuce sandwiches."

Dorothy looked puzzled; Jane's cheeks crinkled appreciatively.