Mountain Part 47

When she had purchased it and made it up, he had to admit that it was the most colorful spot in the house.

And what a colorful time those first days were! Many of the ordinary achievements toward the joint home brought positive ecstasy.

The puffed pride of those ruby cushions marked the end of the metamorphosis of the house into a home. "It's really presentable, now,"

she sighed contentedly, as she sat in their own chair, on their own porch of their own dwelling.

Pelham lounged back against her knee, studying the dark countenance of the mountain; somehow its spell had drawn toward it the face of the house, and the unlidded gaze of its blind-less front eyes. There was a pleasant rustle in his ears, as his wife bent over her sewing; Jane could not resist an occasional tingle of embarra.s.sment at this preoccupation, in his presence, with the intimate mends in her garments.

Would she ever dare mend his! What shameless and delightful publicity marriage entailed!

Abstractedly he thought over the outstanding raptures of these days.

What simple stuff made the enduring pleasures! There was the thrill, for instance, when he had, with studied casualness, pulled out of his pocket the signed lease, for her inspection. What an unimportant thing, yet wearing somehow the grace of man's protecting, shelter-building role!

Then the zest of standing beside her while they chose furniture ...

rugs, table, bedroom furniture.... The emotional exaltation had been immense. And the first meal they had had in the dining-room, with matter-of-fact Lily in and out in matter-of-fact fashion, and Jane across the white and silver expanse, her face softened by the soft lighting--these moments might become habitual, but the ecstasy of their first tasting had welded a permanent bond connecting the two. Added to this delight in things was the growing joy in each other--the day's cordial comradeships, the splendor of cool nights sacred to love, and reverent gray dawns in which he woke to watch the loveliness of her calm face asleep on the pillow's rumpled primness--these shook him with their intimate beauty.

"Tired, dear?" He put up his hands and caught hers.

"Not a bit. I sighed through sheer animal comfort, I think."

"You've earned a holiday--busy since morning with the house. Get your wraps; you don't choose the club--let's go up to the crest, and watch for Canopus.... If we're in luck, he'll be visible in a quarter of an hour."

They reached the vantage place; despite the fitful waverings of the horizon air, they saw the star's golden torch drag fierily over the tree-fretted heights of Shadow Mountain. There was a sullen reddish smolder over the face of this alien sun; but the brief glimpse of the burning visitant from southern skies was an unforgettable experience.

"If we could only watch it from the old top of the mountain."

"The old top, Pelham?"

He traced Nathaniel Guild's idea of the mighty sky-piercing ridge that had once united the iron strata of this crest and the West Adamsville one, with an overlap of sandstone whose grayed relics still crumbled in the small hills flanking the two iron ranges.

"It shrivels our puny importance, doesn't it, dear, to think of the former majesty of these hills!"

"We're as important to ourselves, Pelham."

Together in spirit they climbed the airy darkness that had been the old mountain; their fancies winged back to the shaken ages before man's weak restlessness hid in trees and caves, and came out into the open, to clear away and shape the forests, and split apart the everlasting hills for the malleable wealth hid within them.

But the ecstatic moods could not last forever. The graying embers of the strike re-won their efforts; the inevitable selfishnesses and littlenesses of life came in, to break the filmy web of romance and delight. Man can stay on the high peaks, whether of spirituality or intellect, of surging emotion or unstrung sentiment, but a little while; their rarefied atmosphere, the height of man's upward groping, will not sustain vigorous animal life. When such moments come, if we are in tune we pa.s.s into their magnetic sway whole-heartedly; let the little daily frets, the appet.i.tes and prejudices, be in control, and the height is unclimbed, the high emotion lifting another pa.s.ses unnoticed over our stooping backs.

The two differing personalities found life together a perpetual welter of adjustment. Insofar as they were adaptable, these adjustments were easy; but neither his training, as a favored first son, nor her self-sure nature, helped cushion the continual shocks. Neither had reached the opinionated thirties, when inconsiderate habits have rutted too deeply to permit habitual considerateness; but the two determined wills had no easy task to come to agreement upon even small details of the home life.

Pelham's "picturesque" pipes, as he reminded her the unmarried Jane had always described them, showed a depraved tendency to roost wherever their master finished with them.

"But, darling, you _must_ remember," she insisted, in affectionate exasperation. "Lily found one on the piano this morning; I barely moved the sugar bowl, and look at this table cloth! Your old ashes have made it simply filthy. The hall table's marked; your bureau----"

"I always mean to put 'em on the rack," he urged in contrition.

She sniffed distastefully, holding out the offender at the end of dainty fingers. "Here it is."

Again, he would become unreasonably exasperated when she insisted upon asking what meat he would prefer for dinner, when she had him to shop with her. "Mm-hmm, it's a lovely steak," he would agree abstractedly.

"Yes, I like ham, too.... Or a roast. Darling, I don't care. Get anything."

She felt aggrieved at his callousness upon the momentous topic.

Upon other matters connected with eating he was not so unopinionated.

"Just look here, Jane! Lily's douched the potatoes in fat again. You know that fried starch----"

"Yes, dear, I know ... by now. You needn't eat any; she'll bring some mashed ones for you."

He grinned surlily. "I'll try a few, Jane; I like them, though they're not good for me.... Another spoonful, please."

The country club was another viand of contention. Jane had never enjoyed the inconsequential chatter and watery flirtations that were its chief offer; Pelham found in them a forgetfulness from strike worries and the increasing financial problem.

The week after their sight of Canopus, he announced a determination to drop by for tennis with Lane Cullom, and the dinner afterwards.

"You may see Hollis; it's his spring holiday," his wife observed without inflection.

"I saw he was back. I don't mind, if he doesn't.... Sure you don't want to come? For dinner, or afterwards for a few minutes?"

"Dances are so boring, Pell."

"Once in a while I like 'em."

"I'll go next week, if you go then.... Don't make a scene with Hollis."

He jerked with needless viciousness at his belt. "Why make such an a.s.sumption? I'm not going to make a scene."

Her pen scratched raspingly over the businesslike letter-heads of the State Suffrage a.s.sociation. "You almost had a fight with John Birrell, at the bowling tournament."

"You exaggerate everything, Jane. There was nothing like it----"

"You told me----"

"I told you, very plainly, that there would have been a fight, if we hadn't held in our tempers. He's a decent fellow; he's still sore about my mining report. The State is again investigating them."

She did not look up.

"Good-night, dear," planting an indecisive kiss on her hair.

"Good-night."

Probably Hollis would be in uniform, he reflected. The boy hadn't lost any time in joining the Yale Battery, when the President's initial break with Germany foreshadowed war.

Just after dinner, his brother Ned charged up. "h.e.l.l-o, Pell! Didn't expect to see me, did you? Father let me come, because Hollis was here."

"Aren't we the young sport!"

"There he is--Hey, Hollis! Here's Pell!"

The brother, fine-looking in his well-pressed khaki, came over unhurriedly. "h.e.l.lo, Pelham. How you making out?"