Chapter III: Part 3

Neil twisted his shoulders comfortably into the dingy Morris chair. "Your mountain makes me weary, Pell. Morning, noon ... night. You'd think it was the only ore proposition in the country."

Pelham flushed, but unchecked finished his sentence. "It'll be the biggest plant in the whole South yet."

Neil grinned. "When the Adamsville papers get through with it, I suppose it will."

Pelham abruptly changed the subject. "I met one nice girl last week end, Neil--you would have liked her. Her father's Professor North at Cambridge, and she's full of all sorts of crazy notions. Ruth is a suffragette; wanted to vote, or run for governor, or something."

"Shocking," his friend remarked languidly. He was used to Pelham's reactions.

"Tried to convert me."

There was silence for a few moments, then Neil straightened up in his chair. "Do you realize, Pelham, that in Wyoming, where I summered, women have voted for over thirty years? Why, the mayor of one of the mining towns is a mother who has raised eleven children! Crazy notions, indeed."

Pelham looked disturbed. "They must be bad women, if they vote. Who ever heard of a decent lady mixing up with politics? Think of my mother, or yours, Neil; would you be willing to have her mingle with negroes and common riff-raff at the polls?"

The other exploded at this. "She does! Mother's the best little stump speaker in the county! And Polly's been to two conventions already."

Pelham lighted a handy cigarette. "I always said that Texans were batty."

"What did you do to your suffragist, anyhow?"

"Oh, she had too much coin for my simple taste. If father learned about her, he couldn't talk anything else.... Not for mine!"

A rattle of knocks on the door broke off the discussion. Several graduate students pushed into the room. "Hello, Judson. Going out for supper, Neil?"

He stretched himself up, and reached for a cap. "Pell and I were just about to prowl down to Heublein's."

"Come on, then."

As they crossed Chapel Street, the rubber-lunged news-boys were shouting, "All about the big strike! Street car men to quit to-morrow!"

Pelham purchased a smudgy sheet. While the waiter was double-quicking their orders, all eyes were directed at the leading story.

"Look at this," Ralph Jervis, one of the classmates, pointed insistently, "the president of the road says he'll break the strike with college men. Let's take a week off, and be blooming motormen!"

A spectacled Senior dissented at once. "It wouldn't be the thing, fellows. Those strikers may be in the right, for all we know."

Jervis howled his disgust. "That's what comes of joining the Socialist Study Club! Falkhaven's a regular anarchist. Why, it's a great idea! Are you on, Neil?"

"Sure!" The Texan roused himself to answer briskly. "If Pell'll come too."

"I'm for it," Pelham assented quietly.

The constant deference and affection displayed toward his big-hearted roommate hurt him, against his will. For all his ability in studies and on the mat, Pelham was not popular. He had never been accepted in the higher circles of Sheff life, the Colony and Cloister groups; and he in turn held himself aloof from the run of the class.

He was a thorough-going snob, for all his talk of democracy. Anywhere in the South, which held the finest people in the country, a Judson would be known and recognized, and given his proper place. These Yankees, no matter how nice they might be personally, were Republicans; in the South, only negroes and turncoats belonged to that party. At meetings of the Southern Club, he had seconded the resolution asking that negro students be provided with a separate gymnasium and eating hall. It had furnished a week's laugh to the University; hot-headedly, he resented this. He felt that the leading men held him merely on tolerance; he shrank in upon himself.

This feeling of isolation was not entirely unwelcome. He had become used to it in his mountain days. Here it had driven him to the College Library, where he had mastered all its bulky volumes on mining and kindred phases of engineering. He branched from these into higher mathematics, until he could stump his instructor on the fourth dimension. The previous Christmas holiday, he had turned to modern European drama, and had covered what he could find in an amazing short time; although it was not easy to stomach such plays as "The Weavers," and some of Shaw's dramatic maunderings.

His college loyalty, and class loyalty, in the social sense, continued at a high pitch; and he was among the first to arrive at the office of the New Haven Electric, and to sign up for strike-duty.

He spent an intense morning learning the mechanism of the car--it was not difficult, for a good driver; and he knew automobiles thoroughly.

He was put at a controller on the Savin Rock run, with a halfback for his conductor, and two guards furnished by a Newark agency to aid the uniformed policemen in preserving order through the rioting poorer districts.

The resort was reached, and the return made, in a tiresomely unexciting manner. On the second trip out, a crowd had gathered near the turn by the switching yards, which shouted epithets at the green crew.

"They're a bunch uh mouthin' blackguards, mate," the cheek-scarred guard on the front platform observed with alcoholic familiarity. He dodged a spattering tomato flung jeeringly by a tiny Irishwoman. "All they does is shoot off their mouth."

Pelham found the guard's nearness the main irritation of the ride.

When they neared the same corner on the run in, two women stepped into the street. He slowed the car. They suddenly turned back to the sidewalk. He urged the speed up two notches.

A wagon had been backed across the track. "Clear that off, there." The driver was evidently too asleep, or drunk, to heed.

"You move it," he ordered the guard.

As the man stepped down uneasily, the rush began. Out of the cheap lodging houses and dingy side entrances flooded shouting men, women, children. Bricks, garbage, old bottles thumped against the car sides.

"Better not stop, Judson," the green conductor's shout reached him. "It'll be hot in a minute."

The guard struggled with the heads of the horses. A whirling broom-handle from the sidewalk knocked him against the wheels. He let go the bits, uncertainly.

"Kill the dam' scabs!"

"To hell with 'em!"

"Yah, scabs! Kill the college scabs!"

Pelham swung the heavy switch key dangerously close to the heads of the rioters near the footboard. "Shove off that wagon, there. We're going through."

The horses backed protestingly. The iron rod leapt toward the shrinking crowd. The track was cleared.

Baffled, they surged across the rails in front; car windows were smashed, a turmoil boiled on the rear steps, where policeman and conductor battled with the more incautious attackers. The second guard sneaked off down the alley.

Three or four boarded the front steps. A shrieking woman in the lead caught Pelham's arm. He felt himself dragged toward the door. The swiftness of it dazed him; he could not hit a woman.

"Naw yer don't!" The guard woke up, tore loose the woman with bullying arms. "This rough stuff don't go!" He threw her back into the crowd. An Italian bent at Pelham's feet; a shiny blade snaked toward his leg. He cracked the man's shoulders with the switch key; the knife rang on the cobbles.

Pelham toed the bell vigorously. The car started with a jerk. The front caught one fleeing obstructor, throwing him sideways. Infuriated jeers and howls came from women and children forced aside. A brick splintered the glass at his right, just missing his head. He broke through, and came into the center of the town.

A dispatcher took charge, placed him on a quieter run, and laid off the Savin Rock line for the day.

He compared experiences with the others at supper. Jervis was in the hospital, with a stove-in rib; Neil's ear wore a bandage; others were laid up wholly or partly. Two of the strikers had been shot in an open battle near the station, and a guard killed; the hospitals were filled with minor injuries. The casualty list beat football, they agreed; and it was better sport!

By the next day, the streets were more orderly. Police reserves patrolled the focal spots, with orders to shoot to kill; mobmen were clubbed on the slightest provocation, and arrested wholesale for vagrancy. The station wagons clanged throughout the streets all day. Pelham went back to his first run; there was no further tie-up.

He was switched later to the line Neil was on. This route pushed far into the country, and through the depressing filth of a mill suburb. Jeering lanes of factory men and women lined the roadway; most of them, Pelham judged from the chatter, must be Polacks. There was one persistent group centered around the tail of a cart. Here a woman gesticulated fiercely beneath a red banner.

A stooping giant of a man, six feet three at least, turned from the speaker's words to shake his fist at the approaching car and scream profanely at its driver. "You lousy scab! You dam' thief!"

Pelham, secure in reliance on the bluecoat beside him, stopped the car. "You're a liar," he said shortly. "Go on about your work, instead of swearing at peaceful citizens."

The man sputtered in frenzy. "This was my run, you----" The profanity spilled recklessly. "Stealing the bread out of working men's mouths, you white-livered scab!"

Pelham turned quickly. "Why don't you arrest that man, officer?"

The protector looked at him coolly; he spat deliberately over the railing. "Fer what? He's only telling the truth. You are a scab, now, ain't you?" He scolded the enraged striker. "Go on, Jimmy. Cool off somewhere. That ain't no way to talk to a motorman from the Yaleses college, that ain't. You don't wanter get run in."

The man cursed himself out of their sight. Pelham drove in more thoughtfully.

Paul, when he learned of it, was not too proud of his son's performance. There was no use in getting one's head cracked unnecessarily, he wrote. But he was as pleased as Pelham at the successful crushing of the strike, which came with startling quickness after the men had been out five days. The union officials made some agreement with the company, and vanished to Boston. Some of the men were taken back, some were not. Sheff resumed its normal placidity.

"Your life is too valuable, Pelham," said his father's letter, "to risk in direct contact with the white trash that gather when a strike is declared. Some of the men on the mountain are just as worthless and discontented. We know how to handle them here....

"You might visit Senator Todd Johnson when you pass through Washington. He is a good man to keep in touch with.

"Mary and the two youngest got off to St. Simon's Island yesterday. The girls follow on Monday. That will leave us to keep the work up during the summer.

"The first report shows 291 tons from the Forty this month, and nearly as much from the other property. We're getting started slowly.

"I shall be glad when you get back and down to work."

Pelham took the first train South, after commencement was over.

VIII

"Well, young man, ready to go to work?"

"This morning, father."

Paul took up the extra slack in his belt. "Oh, we won't rush you. You'd better take the first week off and visit the Barbours. They're getting pretty old, Pelham; they'll appreciate it."

"All right, sir."

Paul stopped to examine a badly-hung gate, sagging weakly away from its post. "I'll fire that lazy Peter, if he doesn't 'tend to these hinges better. A cow could push through and eat up five hundred dollars' worth of shrubs before your mother caught on.... We'll have you meet some of the men."

They came up behind a stubby, middle-aged Irishman, loudly ordering a group of white workers who were timbering the newest mine entrances. "D'ye want the whole mountain to fall on you? Jam it under that slide rock, man."

At the father's hail he turned genially. "Mornin', Mr. Judson."

"This is the son I was telling you about. Pelham, this is Tom Hewin, who keeps things moving in the mines."

"Pleased to meet you, sir." There was a servile hump to his shoulders; a deprecating instability in his glance greeted the boy. "Hey, Jim." A youth of Pelham's age, an uncertain smile dancing from his eyes, advanced from the overalled workers. "This is my boy, sir. I'm learnin' him to be a boss miner too." Hewin's flattened thumb pointed to Pelham. "Want me to put him to work, sir?"

"He'll report next Monday."

Tom scratched a bristly head. "They'll be plenty for you to do, sir."

"How's that drain in Number 11, Tom?"

Pelham admired his father's vigorous handling of the varying questions. His own opinion was asked about one matter, as they inspected the cut-ins of the ramp cleaving Crenshaw Hill. He backed up Hewin's solution; the facile superintendent promptly flattered the young man's grasp of the problem.

As they walked back to breakfast, Paul shared a further insight into the human element of the work. "Yes, he's a good man to have there. He directed one of the Birrell-Florence mines for two years; quit in some row or other. He doesn't get along too well with his men. I don't trust him; he'll pad the rolls, and undermark the weights, every chance you give him. He'd steal from the niggers and miners, and from me as well, if I'd let him. That's one of the reasons I'll be glad to have you on the job.... He gets things done."

"What will I do, father?"

"You're to be his assistant; he'll keep you busy. Fifty a week, to begin with. When you're worth more, we'll increase it."

Pelham's mind played around the conversation all during the trip to Jackson that followed. It was not just what he had fancied, he told himself, staring at the green hump-backed hills along the road. Why should he not be head of the operations? But that could come; he must show his worth first.

There was a persistent shock of disappointment in the amount he was to receive. It was hardly respectable. His allowance since junior year had been five thousand.... Well, he could make it do.

His self-complacency returned at the grandparents'. Jimmy, who had still a year in law school, was dazzled by the Sheff product; Lil, who had rounded into ample, magnolia-like beauty, capitulated devoutly. The old people's loving pride warmed him; but its flavor cloyed. He was glad at the end of the week to return his attention to the mountain.

Hewin found the boy quick at observation, and a good listener; the contact evidently suited the Irishman immensely. Now was the chance, he decided, to solidify himself with the Judsons. Pelham became familiar with every detail of the work. He ended with a confused impression that the bustling superintendent had either done every stroke with his own battered hands, or had devised and inspired it.

"They're good workers," he concluded, marveling at the patent energy.

"They'd better be."

With such a spirit, anything was possible. It was only later that he realized that this was surface activity; that the leisurely gait of negroes and whites alike quickened only when the boss was in sight.

The first ramp lay to the north of the house, through what was still called "Coaldale the Second;" the second, on the Logan land south of the gap, was put into his especial care. He bent over blueprints and calculations, verifying what had been planned. Careless bits of figuring were corrected; he found one plot of openings contrary to all reason.

"Your number two will collide with the entry above, Mr. Hewin. Look--it ought to be opposite five, here."

Tom studied the diagram from all angles, then laid it down. "Figurin' ain't everything, Mr. Judson. You've got to know your ground. Bring along them maps."

They mounted above the level where the negroes were timing their pick strokes with a wailing improvised chant, reminiscent of cotton field spirituals.

"See that flaw? All your figgers don't take no account of it. We cut in below here, then bend in to the left. This way.... When I was with the Birrell-Florence folks, we went right in under a flaw. The dam' timbers slipped one day, an' we lost four mules, as well as half a dozen niggers. You got to know your ground."

Pelham straightened the line a trifle, corrected the figures, and the cutting went on. The third month showed a marked improvement over the second.

Gradually he noticed that, while there was a great show of deep mining with the first ramp and the delayed second one, the main vigor was bent to the easier dislodging of the outcrop.

He studied the agreements, measured the cleared areas carefully, and carried his discoveries to Paul.

The father took the matter up with Hewin. "How far have you gone to the north, past the mouth of the ramp?"

"About four hundred feet, sir."

"Measure it."

The tape showed five hundred forty.

"By the agreement, you couldn't go beyond four hundred and twenty feet, with eight ramp openings."

"Them damn' niggers must a moved the stob I put in. We won't go no further."

The outcrop-scraping continued fifty feet, before another opening was made.

World-unsettling events were happening, during the weeks when this minor dispute disturbed the serenity of relations on the mountain between owner and contractors. The same day that Pelham reported the repeated trespass on the easy outcrop, the startled papers told of the vaster trespass across the convenient miles of Belgium, which was bitterly contesting the gray-green flood of alien soldiers. The father turned from the headlines to discuss, with caustic vigor, the annoyance nearer home.

"There's no way to stop it, Pelham. They'll rob the surface, no matter what the contract reads. It's so much cheaper to get at ... lazy scoundrels! It 'ud take six years in court to settle it. Meanwhile, the mine would be locked up tighter than a barrel."

"You could get damages."

"Not a cent ... not solvent. Keep your eye on them; we'll play them along. Bad as this war promises to be, somebody's liable to need our iron. Prices must boost; the Hewin contract will hold our cost down. We won't lose."

There were few minds in Adamsville, at this time, that saw even this much connection between the remote struggle and placid home affairs.

In the spring, the third ramp was cut--half a mile to the north, beyond the crest of Crenshaw Hill, through a row of trees called the Locust Hedge. North of its base, on a wide bowl-like opening, the shacks and stockades for certain convict miners were built. Paul's bid for two hundred of the State long termers had been successful; these were isolated near the extreme end of the Crenshaw property, and kept at the deeper mining in the third series of entries.

Nearer Hillcrest, the underbrushed ridge at the foot of the higher peak was cleared, and houses were built for workers who did not live in Adamsville, or Lilydale, the negro settlement saddling the low Sand Mountains. A prong of the mountain shielded the Judson home from this shack town; otherwise the screams, shots, and general disorder around pay days would have driven away the family. "Hewintown" was the railroad's designation for the flag station below it; "Hewin's Hell Hole" was its usual title.

Here Tom Hewin brought the three hundred miners from Pennsylvania, after he had discharged several gangs who fretted under the talk of union agitators.

Pelham helped erect the larger frame houses for the commissary, the office, and the overseers' homes. Frequently he idled through the two settlements, and tried in awkward fashion to understand the personal side of the workers. They answered civilly questions about their work; when he tried to go further, they drew back, surly and distrustful. He could not understand this wall of reserve.

One weazened grouch, Hank Burns, who had been a miner for forty years, tried to account for it. "Why should they trust you, Mr. Judson? They know you think they're dogs."

"But I don't!"

"Ain't you the owner's son? And a superintendent to boot. What should you have to do with such as us?"

Pelham gave way to a gust of pique. "That's a silly way to look at it."

Hank shook his head sagely. "Silly or not, Mr. Judson, how else can they look at it? You--or your paw--hires 'em, don't he? You can fire 'em too, if you don't like their talk. I hear some of 'em say, the other day, you was snoopin' 'round to spot union men. They know better than to talk."

The other shook his head, puzzled. "You talk to me."

"I ain't got no folks I've got to keep goin'. If I'm fired, I'm fired. 'Twon't be the first time. 'N' I don't shoot off my mouth any too much, either. Your job is to keep 'em workin', an' pay 'em what you got to. Their job is to get what they can. That's all there is to it."

"The good of the mines is their good."

The old man chuckled noiselessly. "I ain't never seen it, if it is. You want what you can get, they want what they can get. You can't both have it...."

This was all Pelham could learn from him; it was as far as he could get.

Tom Hewin stayed on the job at all times. His son, Jim, every two or three months, broke loose for a half-drunk. He was too crafty to drink to the point where he lost control of himself; but he would become mean and quarrelsome. He made a habit of disappearing at these times for a couple of days.

"Jim sick again?" Pelham would ask, curious to piece out what he knew of the doings of these inferior folks.

Tom would lower at the absent son. "I used to whale his hide off for it, Mr. Judson. He's big enough to lick me now. He don't do no harm; an' I never seed him really intoxercated. He makes good money; he'll be a boss miner yet, even with this here foolin'. Booze an' women.... Every young man has to shoot off steam now an' then. They can't fool you, can they, now?" He leered in low camaraderie. "You been there yourself, eh? Don't tell me!"

Pelham was sure that he would not.

What with his work and reading, Pelham would have been content to remain a recluse on the mountain. Paul drove this out of his head at once. "Join the University Club as soon as you can; we'll make your salary two fifty a month, and you can afford the Country Club also. Circulate; it's good advertising. We'll keep the hill going somehow."

The first taste led to more; soon he was a regular part of the life at the clubs. Frequently he would knock off at four, while the other workers were still at their jobs, to clean up and whizz over the hills for a sharp match of doubles, or an energetic foursome.

He could not manage a thrill of regret at the news that the sweetheart of a few summers back, Virginia Moore, was to be married in October. There was a new crop of debutantes, and most of the girls of his college days still put themselves out to attract him. For a few months he rushed Nellie Tolliver, a brilliant hand at auction; but he tired of her stiff preoccupation with the narrow limits of gossiping small talk.

One of his sister Nell's friends, Dorothy Meade, was more to his liking. She had come from some level of Washington social life, to marry Lyman Meade, the local representative of the Interstate Power Company. Lyman went his own easy way, and she hers. _Chic_, with an orderly aureole of fluffy gold hair, sparkling gray eyes and a perpetual display of more of her shoulders and breast than the lax club convention permitted, her only difficulty was in repelling admirers.

Saturdays were the regular dinner nights at the Country Club; Dorothy was the final fluffy attraction that turned Pelham into an invariable attender. He annexed himself to the lively group that ringed her on these occasions, to the amusement of her gayer admirers.

"Here's Dots, poaching on the bassinet preserve!" some professional bachelor, his head innocent alike of hair and illusions, would indict.

"First childhood or second, why should I discriminate?" Her cheerful offensive routed the covetous critics.

Dorothy's young moth was at least persistent. Her attractive bungalow dominated the hilly head of a by-street near the links, and Pelham formed the habit of dropping in for Sunday suppers. She was good to her maids, preparing and serving herself the crisp salad mysteries and froth-crowned desserts.

"Can't I help some way?"

Her eyes would twinkle adorably. "Mamma's helpful boy! Here, let me put this apron on you!"

He could feel her voluble fingers whisper to him, as they shaped the knot; she would stand close before him, to see that the linen badge of utility hung evenly from his stretched shoulders. This disturbed the regularity of his heart-beats; but then, she was Lyman's wife, reflected Pelham. When the husband was present, he smiled enviously at the timid and satisfied adoration that Pelham's efforts to conceal published the more.

Despite all of his reading, Dorothy's marriage made her, in his brown adolescent eyes, wholly intangible. She could not have been guarded more effectually by the Chinese Wall, or a thicket of fire, with a paralyzed Siegfried moping without. Her liberal hints encountered an adamant obtuseness; he was not linguist enough, in her case, to read correctly frankly provocative pouts, slanted glances, even her gipsying fingers, that brushed his like the kiss of wind-wedded blossoms. These and more became substance of his erotic fancies; but the world of fantasy and of reality, in this case, he knew could never blend.

His amorous stupidity often exasperated her.

One night she yielded a narrow seat for him on the porch-swing, an openly demanded tete-a-tete, although the cushions on the stone steps and the settles within were warm with gossiping friends. "You're always so mournful when you're with me, Pelham."

"Oh, Mrs. Meade!" She tied his tongue when it came to repartee.

"Oh, Mr. Judson," she mimicked fretfully; then affirmed with decision, "you must meet Jane Lauderdale. She's about your tempo."

His eyes widened apprehensively; Dorothy's caprices were sometimes alarming. "Who's she?"

"The most serious little soul I know ... and the dearest. You'll like her, when you meet her."

"When?"

"Planning to desert me already, sir! I'll have you for a month yet; she's away."

"I'm satisfied; it's your lead;" he dropped with some gracefulness into the parlance of auction bridge.

The time came when she took the lead. The crowd were noisy at the piano one night, when Dorothy turned to him, in the tiny butler's pantry, laying her piled platter on a shelf behind his head. Lifting her chin, she said provokingly, "Don't you want to kiss me, Pelham?"

The suggestion plunged him under a quick disquieting flood of emotion. One of his precious ideals citadeling womanhood crumbled with intuitive rapidity. A warm inner lash flushed his neck and cheeks. Beyond this betrayal, which was of short duration, he showed no sign of this delicious incarnation of his remotely fantasied passion, this focalizing on the solid earth of an ethereal hunger and its satisfaction.

His arms rounded her; he brought his lips down to her level; her own, moist and cool, opened within his. The ecstatic sensation closed his eyes.

She slapped him lightly on the cheek. "That's enough, now, you big boy!"

All that evening he kept his eyes on her, and managed a pilfered caress just before leaving.

Her eyes laughed at him. "Do you know, Pelham, I'm not sure I'll wish you on Jane, after all!"

He began to time his visits to the Meade house so that they found Lyman away. One cool dusk--Lyman was in Philadelphia for the week--he veered carefully to something that was worrying him. "Nell--my sister--swears that the crowd are talking about us, Dorothy."

"Wants to wean you?" She laughed mellowly, the fluffy crown of curled gold dancing, as if sharing the mirth. "They've talked about Lyman for years, now; it hasn't slowed him. I like you far too much, boy dear, to give you up for idle tongues."

"I hate to have them mention _you_." He twitched restlessly. "You know what you're doing to me, Dorothy. I've been straight ... so far. You're setting me on fire. This is a slippery hill to keep straight on; I might skid."

"Meaning?" She achieved two passable smoke rings--the effort after them was her chief motive in smoking--and idly planned a gown, tinted like the furnace-glowing sky, with twined gray smoke-wreaths in couples and trios--grouped figures that blent into one, then idly drifted apart.

"Kissing's only excuse is as a prelude to love's physical finale," he answered straightly. The dusk hid her wry face, as he continued, "Lyman's in the way. You say you still love him."

"Yes...." She paraphrased, with a show of pondering, something she had read in a showy woman's magazine. "He can't help being what he is. None of us can change the material, though we may alter the pattern, or dye the goods.... Much good that would do."

"The lady turned philosopher!" His hand caressed her fluffy short sleeve caressingly. "So ... you won't take me for a lover."

"Hardly," she laughed with sober hunger, grieving at youth's lack of subtlety.

"You're setting me on fire," he repeated with somber relish. "You'll drive me to some other woman, or ... women. You'll lose me either way; you wouldn't want me then; and I----this can't last always."

"I'll run the risk, boy."

The street quieted, as the late cars from the club droned away into the mist-damp distance. As Pelham turned on his lamps for the homeward run, he saw that the great summer triangle had swung from the east to the sunset horizon; Vega's white beauty, dragging near the western hills, was smudged by the unsleeping breath of those squat furnaces and coke ovens, whose pauseless task was to transmute the riven ore into iron sows and pigs--the first step in the alchemy that transformed the skeleton of the mountain into a restless trickle of gold, urging itself into the overfull vaults of his father. Paul slept now, as the son would soon sleep; but those furnaces, and their parched servitors eternally feeding the hungry mouths of fire, did not sleep. Some tortuous filament of thought brought him back to Dorothy, and the flaming furnace that she had helped light within him ... which did not sleep. With all of the scorching rapture which her surface surrender yielded, he wondered if it would not have been better if he had not met her.... There were once three men in another fiery furnace; but they had walked out, unsinged. He knew himself well enough to be sure that he had no salamander blood; was he strong enough to tempt the break from the charring spell? Well, there was time to think of that again.

When he reached the highest crest, Vega still hung over the sullen glow of a furnace throat; but the smudge had grown darker.

The next morning his father, who seemed gifted with the ability to pierce unerringly to whatever weighed on the son's desires, went into the subject with him. "This isn't criticism, Pelham; it's an attempt to help you steer clear of any mess. Particularly with a married woman. It sounds--nasty."

The son was indignant. "There's been nothing improper. I've taken a few Sunday suppers there----"

"Of course, of course." Pelham knew these dry tones. "It doesn't pay. I ought to have talked with you before. It's easy for a young man, particularly with good financial prospects, to get roped in by some woman, married or unmarried.... Sometimes he has to pay well to get out."

"That's ridiculous, about ... about ..."

"It doesn't pay, visiting one woman," Paul continued, in matter-of-fact tones. "Young Little almost had to marry one of the telephone operators at the Stevens Hotel. His father loosened up five thousand to get rid of her. I haven't any money to waste on your foolishness."

There was a silent interval.

"If you must have a woman--I passed through the stage myself, like all young men--don't you fool with the half-decent kind. You'd better go right down to Butler's Avenue, and pay your money down for what you get. There's less chance of diseases--they have medical inspection. And it avoids a serious mix-up."

Pelham's face went white. "I don't need that kind of advice. I've kept straight so far; I intend to keep so, until I'm married. Money couldn't pay me to go there."

The older man exhaled noisily. "Remember what I said."

A swelling white rage choked the boy's voice. "Does--does mother know that you went to--such places?"

Paul turned sharply. "Of course not. There are some things women are supposed to know nothing about."

That was the end of the discussion.

Pelham gradually decreased the frequency of his visits; but he still managed precious afternoons with her in his car, and occasional evenings, which left him irritatingly disturbed. He wanted to see more of her, and knew that he should see less; he was eager even to hear her name mentioned at home, but embarrassed if it was.

"Listen, Nell," he interposed to his sister, when he was helping to draw up the list of guests for a summer fete the girls planned. "You used to be pretty fond of Mrs. Meade."

"Not much! You can't have your Dorothy here."

Pelham was exasperated with the whole lot--always excepting his mother. His long confidences with her had begun when he was a child, and still were a pleasure and a panacea. One of these talks gave aid to his bewilderment about Dorothy, although she was not mentioned. It had started inconsequentially with a discussion of little Ned's conduct, and dipped into many topics. In the course of it, he promised to sound both the brothers on their attitude toward girls, and the annoying problem of sex.

"You can do much more with the boys than I, Pelham. They'll listen to an older brother, where they wouldn't listen to their mother."

Lovingly he patted the smooth flush of her cheek, delighting in the shy wildrose beauty of her face. His fingers crept from this to the straight chestnut folds of her hair, longing to stroke its unbound cascades, and let them curtain his face, as she had done when he was a little boy in bed; as she still sometimes did.

Then he answered her. "I listened to you, mother. It was your words and your wishes that have kept me straight."

"And, please God, they will always keep my own dear son the finest, cleanest, purest man in the world."

Pelham was wholly under the spell of Mary's idealistic phrases, her sugary circumlocutions and romantic evasions of annoying facts. She had found it impossible to meet Paul's brutal logic with her ill-trained feminine inconsecutiveness; the course she took was an acceptance couched in some inoffensive generality or platitude, with a sentimentalized deity as authority for her stand. Paul pierced through the unmeaning glamor; but the children did not. When things went smashing, contrary to her plans and wishes, somehow God willed it ... a convenient, kindly-disposed arranger, unless Paul's vigorous planning took precedence. Her thirty-nine connubial articles could be summed up in one: Paul could not be wrong, in the children's eyes; her wifely duty bound her to wholesale support, even of his errors or occasional unfairnesses. "He is your father, remember," blanketed everything. "God only knows how much I love you," was her unfruitful solace to them. And she did love them, and gave of her best for them, except where fealty to Paul, who came immovably first, intervened.

This prayer of hers for the son's purity continued to ward off the imperative temptations that nearness to Dorothy, or thoughts of Butler's Avenue, spread around him. It fell on his ears now with all of the old power.

He sat, rubbing her hand against his cheek, staring off to the distant vagueness that was Shadow Mountain. The dun clouds along the horizon had obscured its outline; the sky to the south was a sickly copper. Above it pulsed and banded a tumult of smoke gray clouds; the eastern horizon was a slate blue, rapidly darkening. A far rumble of muttered thunder was followed by the vivid glare of sheet lightning, which brought into sharp relief the serrated crest of the distant hills.

Suddenly out of the dull sky came a quick spatter of big drops. She slipped from her son's embrace, and went in to see to windows and doors.

He moved a lazy flanneled leg further from the edge of the porch, where the splashing drops bounced inward.

There was a short lull. He rose, as a white tongue of fire forked its way toward the near summit of Shadow Mountain, followed immediately by a deafening pattering rattle of thunder.

Hurrying in from the front porch, his mother met him, a strained look in her eyes. "There's a storm coming, Pell. Your father's on the way home. I hope it doesn't catch him."

Pelham moved idly into the library. Out of the side window he could see the approaching wall of misty rain, blotting out the familiar outlines of trees, the negro cottage beyond the spring depression, the spring buildings, the outhouses. How quiet, how unerring and irresistible its course!

The marching fusillade of drops touched the side of the barn, and darkened it ominously: from a soft gray it shaded swiftly to a rain-drenched black. Now it menaced the house itself; now the impartial advance of the shrapnel, in slanting crystal lines, brought the house beneath its unrelenting fire.

Pelham switched on the light, and pulled out an unread volume of Stevenson. His fingers loafed over the leaves, as he listened to the persistent drive of the storm.

IX

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 passive, 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 God! 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 scraped 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 assumed 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 naivete 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 naivete, 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 Saturday 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 banal ... 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 banal, 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 Massachusetts 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.

The older woman turned to the girl with ruffled rudeness. "Stay on for supper, Jeanne?"

The other shook her head. "I must run along. Choir practice to-night," with a mischievous dimple.

"Religious all of a sudden?"

"The rector flourishes in my spiritual presence."

"How is his new reverence?"

Her mouth twisted piquantly. "Mushy.... Nice boy, though. Coming by to-morrow?"

"Between three and four."

"So long.... Good night, Mr. Mine Superintendent."

Pelham convoyed her to the steps, doubly unwilling to let her go, as he reflected on her fresh charm, and the blind alley of the other woman's amorousness. "I enjoyed our talk, Miss Lauderdale. Could the course continue?"

"I'm always glad to have a human being to talk to. I'm staying with the Andersons; the number's in the phone book."

Thoughtfully he returned to the porch, and a cretonned wicker chair, ignoring the message of the partly-occupied couch.

Inquisitive gray eyes watched him. "Do you like her?"

"Oh, so-so. She seems intelligent."

"Men never do like Jeanne," she assured him, with a complacent rippling gesture of her flounced body. "She's a dear, but too dreadfully serious. Doesn't like dancing, and all----" waving vaguely in the direction of the club.

"Tell me something about her."

"There isn't much. Jeanne--I love the French twist, don't you?--Jeanne's a queer, dear girl, Pelham; always busy with labor committees, or something as uplifting and tiresome."

"I've never heard of her, except from you. Is she kin to the Andersons?"

"Oh, no; her people are northern. She was living with an aunt in Philadelphia; tired of her, and skipped out. Another of her modern notions.... She's intelligent; but, then, brains don't marry,--they go to Congress. Or is it the other way? Anyhow, Lyman says that I have no brains." She smiled provocatively.

This time he came, in answer to her pouting, unworded bidding. He was heartily glad, as apparently eager arms gave her the desired harborage, that the other girl was by now blocks away.

A day or two later he telephoned, and on Friday evening came by the Anderson house at eight.

"I'll be down in a minute," she called from the top of the balustrade.

The Andersons were away for the month, he recalled. With a pleasant restlessness, he prowled around the cosy living-room, and finally selected a library book on the table. It was by a favorite author; but the title, "A Modern Utopia," was new to him. He was into the second chapter when she appeared.

"What a remarkable Wells book!"

She smiled at the enthusiasm. "You don't mind walking, do you?... It's stuffy inside."

"No indeed. Just a moment." He jotted a memorandum of the volume on a handy envelope back.

For all the quiet grace of her face, he noticed that Jane fitted into his stride naturally--and he was a good walker. Instinctively they turned up the hill; the height beyond reached out an irresistible invitation.

Her face drew his eyes as inevitably as the mountain drew their feet. The face had sparkled on the Meade porch; but the brisk fingering of the night breeze woke it to a positive radiance. When she turned her eyes upon him, their radiant lashes enclosed darker heavens than those above, framing two stars brighter than Vega.

"Tell me about yourself," he urged. "Dorothy said you had 'run away' from your aunt----"

"Sounds like a naughty little girl, doesn't it? It wasn't quite that bad, though."

"Think of running away to Adamsville!"

"It is an 'H' of a place----" She looked quizzically at him; his smile reassured her. "I believe in that kind of hell. But it's nothing, compared to what I left." Her lips closed decidedly.

He would not drop the subject. "Your aunt was a doctor, wasn't she? And a politician?"

"So you are determined to slice to the skeleton. Yes, she's a doctor, runs her own hospital, and as much of the rest of the city as she can. She had the running habit, Mr. Judson; and, the first few years I was with her, she ran me too ... and then ran me away." Unwilling lips locked, as if unhappy at the recollection.

"Just why?"

The words were picked carefully. "She wanted me to live as her echo--parrot her likes and dislikes, accept every limping bias as final truth. My mother was the same type." He fancied that the eyes shone more lustrously; but they were turned away. This topic, of the conflict between the girl and her parents, stirred him to a disquieting curiosity, avid for all the details, the hows and the whys; as if the answers held some clew that he sought for.

She answered the question that he refrained from asking. "Yes, she's alive; I left her, to go and live with Auntie. The thing sounds unbelievable, and ridiculous; but she wanted to keep me forever at the age of thirteen and a half. Father was dead, and she looked young; a grown daughter was something to explain away. Why, she would have kept me in knee skirts if the neighbors hadn't talked.... When she married again, I left."

"Are those the only times you ran away?" he smiled the query.