Mountain Part 37

"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 pa.s.sion 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 of _lilas_ that 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 pa.s.sion.

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 bl.u.s.ter 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 h.o.a.ry b.u.t.tresses 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 pa.s.sed 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 role 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 p.r.i.c.king desire to keep him hers and no other woman's as long as possible, into an ingrowing chast.i.ty, a morbidly re-fondled rejection of s.e.x, 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 gla.s.sed sunroom of the Tollivers with a faint echo of the glory of the distant mountain.

XX