Chapter VIII: Part 8

"Hadn't we better wait until things are straightened out a bit----"

"We'll wait until election's over, then. We've waited three weeks now."

"All right. Dawson says he'll back you; he's worth a lot."

Then began first-hand knowledge of the detail of politics for Pelham. Even before the announcement meeting, the socialist local, in its haphazard groping for democracy, selected a committee to steer the campaign. They met in Pelham's office the next night.

Pelham mused over their faces, as they blundered down to business. Surely the most extraordinary group ever assembled to direct the political destinies of Adamsville! Serrano, a bricklayer, a loud voiced, commanding bulk of a man, who banged with the improvised gavel; Christopher Duckworth, pioneer in the Adamsville movement, an impecunious old architect who had had his name on the state ticket at every election for sixteen years; two machinists, fighting units of a fighting group, "Mule" Hinton and Henry Gup; the party's state secretary, Mrs. Ola Spigner, who had come up from her farm in Choctaw County, ever on hand for a fight; Phifer Craft, a failure as a commission merchant, and a deep theoretical student of Marx and Dietzgen; Abe Katz, spokesman of the tailors' union and the Arbeiter Ring; and his landlady, Mrs. Hernandez, invariable woman member on committees. They were not even leaders in their trades, except Serrano and perhaps Katz. Most were poor speakers or spoke not at all. But out of the ill-lit slums and lean cheap suburbs they had been flung together by a burning idealism for a greater world. They were the hands of a people's groping faith.

"I mofe we elect us a treasurer," said Abe Katz seriously. So began the business of the campaign.

Dawson, Ben Spence, even Bowden and the Bivens group dropped in at occasional meetings; but this faithful nucleus was always on hand, doing the real work. They mapped out the itinerary of speakers, got out the first literature, sent soliciting committees to the various unions for endorsement and funds, in fact directed the whole campaign.

Any of the comrades were willing to be broken in as chairmen of the meetings. The speaking at first fell heavily on Serrano, Duckworth, and Pelham himself; but gradually the liberal element of the city came into the fight. Dr. Gulley threw the support of his Free Congregation into the contest with the "County Ring," as represented by Sumter; near-radical lawyers, Will Tatum, Judge Deason, Harvey Cade, eager to oust the corporation toadies, were invaluable assistants; Lane Cullom's car was always at the call of the committee, and shared with Pelham's the duty of touring the rambling county roads to the further meetings.

The unique campaign drew crowds from the start. One night Pelham called for a show of hands of all the men present who were voters; the result was so astonishing, that he repeated the lesson again and again. In West Adamsville, filled with itinerant furnace workers, not one man in fifteen was a voter. In the country districts, about one in ten; in the city, slightly less. With the aid of Ben Spence, he looked up the question, and thereafter added a vigorous attack on the election laws to his onslaughts on the company-owned sheriff's office.

"Do you know what your servants down in Jackson did in 1902, when they framed the new Constitution? They told you it would take the vote from 'the niggers'; it took the vote from you white men as well. In New York, in Illinois, in most of the northern and eastern states, from eighteen to twenty-two per cent of the population vote; in Western suffrage states, up to thirty-five per cent. And in the South? Georgia has something like five per cent, this state four, and Mississippi only three and a half per cent! Half of the men in this state are white; six out of every ten of these have been disfranchised by that Constitution. The cumulative poll tax, which says you can't vote unless every poll tax since 1902 has been paid by the February before the election, the grandfather clause, giving votes to the southern slave-masters and not to the southern wage-slaves who make the state's wealth now, these have robbed you of your voice in the government. The southern laborer has been classed with children, women, negroes, and idiots--will you stand for it?"

The campaign, thanks to the _Register's_ hearty support, began to alarm the politicians. Pat Donohoo, who controlled five saloons, and claimed to be able to deliver the Irish and Catholic vote, came in to see Pelham. "We know your father," he confided huskily. "Give me your word that you'll behave when you're elected, and I'll see that you get every Catholic and Irish vote in the county. We're out to teach Dick Sumter a lesson."

Pelham answered briskly. "Of course I'll behave. My platform says what I'll do, Donohoo. If your men want to vote for me, go to it. They'll get a square deal from me, I'll promise that."

"You see," he explained to the committee, "he's playing safe. No matter who's elected, he can claim the credit."

"Never trust them Catholics," said Mrs. Spigner, a devout propagandist for the _Menace_. "They're all Jesuits."

"He couldn't deliver anyhow," consoled Ben Spence.

The crafty lawyer made the labor support fairly solid, by promising liberal appointments to the State Federation crowd. Pelham did not know about this, and Spence did not imagine that the promises would have to be fulfilled.

For one of the meetings the candidate worked harder than usual. It had been old Duckworth's suggestion that a speaking be advertised for the corner across from the University Club, in the very heart of the "silk-stocking" district. The neighborhood was liberally posted, and the committee were on hand to cover the retreat of the speakers, if too much of a riot developed. To their surprise, the large crowd listened to Dr. Gulley's fervent appeals, to the withering sarcasm of Harvey Cade, and to Judson's vitriolic attack on the leisure class, with close and appreciative attention. One or two of the East Highlands boys hooted a few times, but a policeman routed them. The applause was as hearty here as at Hazelton or Irondale.

Pelham's opponent stirred himself tardily, and was careful not to answer the accurate broadside of charges flung at him by the deposed mining inspector. General attacks on socialism were much more popular than lame apologies for an unfair and one-sided administration; and the common charge that American socialism was pro-German was roared and ballyhooed by the political servants of the corporations, upon platforms opulently framed in bunting. Pelham laughed at this intense patriotism, suddenly discovered as an answer to the sheriff's anti-labor activities; but it made continual inroads upon his strength with the docile people. The tide wavered to and fro; the _Register_ claimed four days before election that Judson's chances were better than even; the alarmed opposing sheets insisted that there was only one man in the race, and that the iron city would never tolerate a man who openly advocated free love, kaiserism, and the despotism of the mob.

The closing rally of the Democrats came on Saturday night, an old-fashioned whooping wind-up in the Lyric theater; Pelham covered five county meetings and two city ones during the same time. Monday night, while the opposing forces rested their public activities, occurred the Judson finale, at Main Park, in the rickety summer band-stand. The trampled green in the open heart of the city was black with intent and serious faces, whose throats cheered themselves hoarse over the hoarsened voice of their leader,--though his tones, roughened by night after night of straining open-air talking, could barely reach half of his crowd.

The final applause was given; the reporters rushed off with their copy; the squads of comrades and union men left with their wives and children for cheap scattered homes. Pelham took Jane back to the Andersons', to sit, glum and wholly exhausted, slumped against the back of the couch, until after two.

"Never mind, you dear old fighter," she insisted. "You've done more than anyone else could."

Tuesday, election day, was a hectic tumult of excitement for both sides. Lane Cullom insisted on driving Pelham in his car, proud of the reflected light that went to the faithful aid of the candidate. The relief of shooting along chill stretches of November road from polling-place to polling-place was indescribable.

At five the polls closed. Pelham, after a lunch-stand supper, sat in his half-dismantled headquarters, his finger upon the pulse of the wires that led to every part of the county.

The returns began. One by one the faithful precincts lifted Judson to a good lead, and increased it. Hazelton, West Adamsville, distant Coalstock, the mining boxes, all went well, more than neutralizing the early farming returns, which were four to one for Sumter. And then the totals grew evener, and wavered now one way, now another. The vocal vote was Judson's; the silent, unchangeable Democratic mass began to lend its weight to the incumbent. There was still a fighting chance. Counting at the city boxes proceeded with sickening slowness.

The last of the county returns was wired from distant Chinaberry Junction: Judson led by fifty-two votes! If the city had broken even, he would have it!

The jubilant comrades and strikers conscripted sudden parades of celebration; the corporations were licked! It would paralyze the companies to have the law-enforcers, their oldtime bulwark, turned against them!

Then, as if at the touch of a single lever, the thirteen big city boxes unloosed their flood of figures. First ward, Sumter, a hundred lead; eleventh, Sumter three hundred ahead; ninth, Sumter, two hundred more; fifth, eight hundred and eighty to the good for Sumter--this was the Highlands ward; not one lone box tallying for Judson. Within twenty minutes, enough of the returns were in to convince Pelham that the citizens of Bragg County had spoken in their freeborn majesty, and had chosen Richard Sumter sheriff by a majority of almost two to one.

The morning papers gave the corrected figures--8,450 to 4,281. The corporations still held the court house.

"It's really a victory," Mrs. Spigner, the state secretary, repeated with cheerless optimism, as Pelham drove her to the early mail train for Choctaw County. "You raised a socialist vote of six hundred something like six hundred per cent. You impatient youngsters, who think one election has any importance! Remember, comrade, it's all a part of the class struggle!"

At the end of a day of fatiguing post mortems and loquacious consolations, of noisy assurances that he had won, punctuating his dismemberment of the decapitated headquarters, he sought his real inspiriter, Jane. The city lay under a shimmer of thin November sunshine, that woke to dusky gold the tawny leaves flickering, at the chilly breeze's lash, upon motionless black boughs--that revealed pitilessly the feathery plumes of golden rod reaching over the sidewalk from the vacant lot beyond Andersons', plumes the season's slow alchemy had transmuted to insubstantial silver fragility, sifting into the reddish mold at the fingering of the spurts of ground wind. Pelham would have preferred a drizzling, cloud-heavy night sky, in which the decrepit cheerfulness of the late landscape, and he himself, could have been decently shrouded in isolating obscurity.

Jane gave him both her hands as he mounted the last step, reading, in the drawn corners of his mouth, and the heaviness beneath his eyes, the half-raised signals of surrender.

There was a flavor of bitterness in his first words. "It was really a victory, after all----"

"You've heard that enough to-day, I know. Don't try to talk: here, these cushions----" slipping them easily under his head, as a firm hand upon his shoulder soothed his protest. "Let yourself relax, all over. There."

Her eyes meditated between one of the chairs and the end of the couch beside him. She sat upon the couch.

The drowsy stillness, the moment's remoteness from the iron affairs of the racking city, the soft rustle of her dress, the gentle eddies of air that seemed scented by her presence, lulled and comforted. He reached for her hand, and laid it against his cheek, where it loitered, a cool solace, a gradual masterer of his undirected fancies.

The hours sagged by. There was little talk; that could wait. Not of his willing his mind began to embroider the miserly store of caresses he had asked or received from Jane; one by one the feverish moments with the other girl, purged into a less bodily ecstasy, recurred to him, with his own love's face and form holding their rightful place in his arms--translated memories which in their turn were embellished by a drugged imagination into warmer visionings of mutual surrender. Attempts to re-channel his thinking were unsuccessful; at last he let the wanton heart have its way.

Never had he needed a mother as now, Jane felt, as she bent her energy toward his tired spirit. He needed more than a mother; his feverish driving unrest would quiet, in arms that held him closer than a mother's might. The time had come for her to be mother to him, and something else. Winner or not, he was a hearty fighter ... decent.... Jane Lauderdale Judson ... the name meant something now; she had helped it mean something. A tired boy; her tired boy....

He looked up into her face at last. Her eyes, radiant with unspoken caresses, were a madonna's ... twin stars over a fretted sea; twin stars, in a heaven so near that he could reach and touch it. Unsteadied, he swung painfully to a seat beside her. Then, compelled by her dominant eyes, he turned and faced her in the shadowy hush. Unsteadily he put out his two arms, touching her lightly, fearfully, upon the shoulders, and lingering there. The pressure of his fingers drew her toward him; a pressure from no visible fingers pushed him inexorably toward her. He felt her breast touch him softly, and settle contentedly against him. He pressed his flushed face against the soft neck and the tendrils of her hair; his lips lay against her flesh, although he did not dare move them.

There was an unhurried rapture of stirless content. Half solaced for the moment, he released her; but his eyes could not leave hers, nor his face move far from her own.

Her clear voice came to him quietly, with the mellow reverberations of a gong touched in dusky stillness. "Stupid...." He could not read the half-closed eyes; he had to lean closer to make out the words. "Is that all?... Must I ask you?..."

His lips touched hers, closed upon them, clung there. A giddy faintness came with the long-withheld ardor; his eyes shut out sight, the other senses ceased for the moment--the frantic remnant of his will and consciousness seeking to make the moment perpetual. His own being seemed to flow out and into the other, he seemed to absorb from the vital contact all of the inestimable dearness that she meant to him. This consummation, devoutly unwished for so long, was for that reason in its realization doubly dear; it brought an ecstasy so brimming that for the time no other sensation found space to obtrude.

Too soon, to his heart, the ecstatic eternity ended. Suddenly ashamed of her daring in permitting the tardy rapture, not to think of inviting it, Jane drew back, releasing her tingling lips into a prim pucker of uncertainty. He sought her a second time, quickened to an arrogant sense of ownership of intangible wonders. Her protest reached him: "We shouldn't, Pelham dear...."

She found her lips too busied to frame more negative commandments, despite her unevenly ebbing struggles of protest.

At length his sense of protection returned; dizzily he leaned back, unstrung, and yet satisfied. The night noises pulsed a rhythm fuller, more harmoniously triumphant with soft surges of loving certainty, than he had ever felt; the pandering darkness was intimate and confidential. With the slowing of the unleashed leap of his blood, recollections of Louise Richard came, as he had once feared; but there was no conflict, no sense of soilure, in the unreal, remote fantasy of the former passion; only a sun-high glory and delight in this, as if the first had been the needed soil in which the plant of love could grow toward fulfillment.

Her ears caught his contented whisper. "What are a thousand defeats, Jane ... loved one ... when there is this at the end of the way?"

"At the beginning of our new way," she amended with sober joy.

"It wipes out all the irks and littlenesses.... Under all our veneer and varnish of culture, business, politics, we are man and woman ... male and female ... our souls as nakedly desirous as were the first two who mated.... Loved one!" It rendered him inarticulate, this delicious stirring up of the hidden deeps. It was for this, he was sure, that men and women had been molded; in this surrender they yielded themselves to the ageless currents of joy-bringing unity that created life, and continued it as life itself.

"I love your hair," she arranged it more to her liking. "It fretted your eyes, that last speech.... I wanted to kiss it away ... then."

XXI

Three weeks after the election, the cold set in. As if to compensate for the maddening torridity of July and August, the biting tail of a snowstorm lashed bleakly over Adamsville. The white flakes danced wildly along the exposed crest of the mountain, stinging summer-seasoned skins. Blasts whistled and shrieked, piling the chill drifts along the rutty streets of Hewintown, sifting through sacks roofing the gaps in the shack shingles.

Then a day of thaw, deepening the roads into a cold slushiness; and that night a downburst of rain and hail, that cased trees, shrubs, hill-paths in a glittering coating of ice. The brittle walks cut into feet whose shoes lacked soling, the slippery steeps flung weakened women and men against pointed rocks, adding to the already over-worked Charities the chill cruelties of winter.

"Where's your overcoat, Ben, in this weather?" Pelham asked Wilson, now out on bail, as they passed on the stiffened sidewalks.

"Ain't got none, Mr. Judson. An' the wife's down with the T. B., an' no blankets in the house."

"I've got an extra coat; come on in to the office.... I'll phone Miss Lauderdale about your people before we go to town."

"There's hundreds like us; you know charity can't stretch very far. What these boys need is justice."

Pelham marveled at the untaught vision that could broaden its individual suffering into universal understanding.

Wilson had not exaggerated the matter. The white plague gained on undernourished men, their lungs rotted with underground damp and dust; on anemic wives and mothers; on starved shadows of children and feebly crying babies.

Each death piled higher their sullen hatred of the company. The overcoated deputies boasted of their huge feeding, and treated with growing insolence the wives and daughters of the men. Powder was being laid for another explosion, in spite of Dawson's frantic efforts to keep the strikers steady.

A worried meeting of the directors of the companies was called to consider the continuing deadlock. "That man Dawson is the trouble," Paul announced briefly to the chairman. "Get rid of him, and the backbone of the strike is permanently dislocated. He's a born mischief-stirrer."

"Pity he can't be hung...."

"... Or tarred and feathered."

Judge Florence reminisced from the head of the table: "In '68 we knew what to do with such riff-raff."

"It can be handled," Dudley Randolph inserted blandly. "He isn't popular with many of the men, as it is. The local unions despise him. Let me have the matter ... investigated. He won't trouble us long."

"Good."

"Your son is a bit troublesome too, Mr. Judson," confessed Henry Tuttle. "Too bad he should be tangled up in it. This thing's got to be settled; with these new English orders, it's suicide for us to withhold any force that can stop this criminal strike."

Kane looked sideways at Paul Judson, who kept his eyes on the table. The satellite spoke up uncertainly. "I'll tell you something--privately--about him, that can stop his talking ... if we must use it."

Tuttle nodded, after a glance at the inscrutable downcast gaze of the vice-president.

"Is there anyone else?" said the chairman. "That lawyer, Spence?"

"No," said Tuttle, decidedly. "He's a lawyer; a lawyer thinks as his clients do," and he smiled acidly. "Bivens, of the _Voice of Labor_, Bowden, Pooley, employ him. He won't risk losing his livelihood ... or go further than they will."

"It's time, Henry," Paul addressed the corporation counsel, "to go ahead with our scheme. We've won the election; minor matters can be--er, investigated, or otherwise handled. But as long as the strike lasts, we are losing; our profit sheets show it. First your move, then ... the militia. I advised it long ago, you remember."

The meeting closed with the uncomfortable, and frequent, impression that, as usual, Paul Judson's sight alone had visioned correctly future troubles--and their remedies.

The last week of November saw the playing of the withheld card. Hurrying clerks of Tuttle and Mabry served on each houseowner the final notice of eviction, granted suddenly by County Judge Little.

Roscoe Little, one of the Jackson family of that name, held a perpetual lien on the judgeship because of his triumphant spinelessness. He had never been known to express a decided opinion on either side of a question; a weak-eyed hail-fellow-well-met, with a chin like the German crown prince, he spent his mornings ruling in favor of corporation attorneys, his afternoons absorbing comic weeklies and whiskey-and-sodas at the University Club. He was unmarried; facetious barristers insisted that he could not commit himself even in affairs of the heart.

There was nothing for the miners to do but move; the rifles of the augmented deputies were an unanswerable persuasion. A few miles up the valley the gray sandstone hill behind the mountain was undeveloped. Spence secured the land at a slight rental, and here tents and scrap-timber shacks did something to keep out the bitter winds of winter.

Pelham helped in the moving, as did many of the socialists. Old Peter came up to him in Hewintown the last day. "Mornin', Mr. Pelham."

"What you doing here, Peter?"

The ancient negro pointed with pride to the shined badge on his coat. "Dey done made me a deppity, dey is."

Pelham turned off.

"Mr. Pelham, ole Tom Cole done come back."

"Not dead yet?"

"You cain't kill 'im. Dey cut 'im open, but he growed back agin. He am powerful sickly, do'. De Ole Boy'll cotch him nex' time; he nacherally favors preachers."

"But not company deputies, Peter?"

The negro chuckled off; Pelham walked back with Dawson from the new shack village. The big organizer was thoroughly out of spirits. "It just ain't moving, Judson."

"What's especially wrong?"

"The negro question, for one thing."

"I know," Pelham said slowly. "Our white labor won't assimilate them, as the rest of the country's labor does to the most backward white races. They're a perpetual scab menace."

"Hell, yes," in sobered agreement. "Then, the South's general backwardness."

"That's natural, here. Our capitalists, some of the slave-owning blood, and all inheriting its attitude, feel less equality: they see labor still as their slaves. Ultimately this will help awaken our people; but now----"

"That's the hell of it; we ain't got the public with us. What with petty union squabbles, and all--it's a job to make a dent in a saint's patience."

"Any chance of a sympathetic strike?"

"What can you do with Bowden and these yellow pups?"

The enthusiasm of the workers, dragged down physically by the hard rigors, slipped lower and lower. Picketing continued, and each arrival of new trainloads of northern scabs threatened a break; but something of the original zest had gone.

Pelham, however, found a compensating zest, in which life overpaid him for the wintry gloom at strike headquarters. After a glum day with the dispirited leaders he could count upon a solace that overbalanced worry and sorrow; downhearted planning for the intransigent struggle gave way to warm-hearted dusk dreams of a future bent to heart's will; the mines and miners were deserted for Jane.

"It doesn't seem fair, dearest dear, for us to be so unreasonably happy, when Ben Wilson, and his tubercular wife, and all the rest, have so little...."

"Your father isn't a happy man."

"... No. He may have been as happy as we, once; fancy him as a young lover! There is a price for ambition centered in grasping things: the soul dries up and shrivels."

"Poor man!"

"This is the real wealth...."

He took her within his arms. At home in his kiss, her lips parted slightly within his, like a bud daring to offer its tenderest petals to the crush of the enveloping wind. When he let her go, he lay slack with delicious unrest.

Abruptly he sat up, a decisive ring in his voice. "I'm going to marry you, Jane."

"I had hoped so." She could not prevent the dimple from smiling within her rounded cheek.

"I mean--now!"

"To-night?"

"I'll get the license to-morrow, adorable child--and we can have Dr. Gulley, or the mayor----"

"Let's have His Honor! An Irish blessing isn't to be scoffed at, and the Free Tabernaclers, as rebels, are a bit pallid. 'The Courthouse Wedding'--how your mother will relish that!"

"They wouldn't come anyhow----"

"It isn't that; but they've gotten so used to your shocking them, that life would lose its savor if you couldn't achieve a fresh shock every month or two. I'm glad my new suit came----"

"As if that made any difference!"

"Ah, it will make a lot--to His Honor, for instance, and whatever reporters carry word of it to the society editresses. 'A dove-colored traveling suit,' they'll call it----"

"Wouldn't red be more appropriate?" he queried judiciously. "With the local en masse as best man, and the Suffrage Association as matron of honor----"

"Don't be horrid. I'll have Mrs. Anderson, and you can bring along your precious Lane Cullom, who is so sure that Nellie Tolliver would be much better for you."

"It's almost a Christmas wedding! We'll steal off for that week to Pascagoula and New Orleans we mentioned. We could take the Gulf Express to-morrow night--you have a time table; I brought it out last month, when we aircastled on honeymoons.... But just think, if you hadn't scorned the country club, you might have had either of the Birrell boys, or----"

"You angler! It's not too late.... No; I have the pick of the bunch."

"Jane, my ... wife." There was comfort and joy in the word.

Considering the matter alone, he was delighted he had dared the plunge. It was not easy, now, to prevent yielding to the watchful voices ever whispering to him, wakened by Dorothy Meade, refired by the rocketing affair with Louise, and now restirred by Jane herself. He had even wandered once or twice down Butler's Avenue and the furtive alleys behind, obsessed with red-lit imaginings of what went on behind those night-lighted windows. His aggressive purism had left him; love should be freely given and taken, he told himself. And it was to be his!

Odd that he had suggested New Orleans, when Louise Richard might be there.... It was a relief that that affair was dead.... This was to-day; the to-morrows were Jane's.

After his departure Jane located the time-table. She studied the formal details dreamily. To-morrow night, by this time, they would be.... And when they had passed this place, and that, what would they be saying? What doing?

The black and white schedule merited respect; it would time their first day ... night ... together.

She laid it aside with a blush; then, bidding her fancies behave, she read over the unemotional schedule until she knew it, appropriately, by heart.

GULF EXPRESS P. M.
Hazelton | 8.07|
ADAMSVILLE |Ar. 8.20|

Exercising the best man's prerogative, Lane Cullom insisted upon having the abbreviated wedding party as his guests at a bridal dinner. The chef at the University Club grill lifted the covers promptly at six, in order that the Queen and Crescent's prized express might not have to cool its wheels in the new Union Station, waiting for the essential pair.

Lane, a satisfied fatigue relieving the crease in his brow, almost missed the first course. "I had to see that the eggnog was mixed properly, Pelham, before it was frozen,--soup or no soup."

The last delicious morsel melted upon their tongues; the host paid a final flying visit to the club's pantry, conscripting two pocketfuls of rice. "Now let's go!"

ADAMSVILLE |Lv. 8.30|

Jane leaned over the back railing of the observation platform, as the engine grunted a command to the wheels to take up their proletarian revolutions; the clanged gate quivered before her; her husband stood at her side. She leaned for a final finger-flutter to the two friends, peering at her out of the golden haze thrown by the big station lamps.

"Good luck," she called back. Her handful of the hailed rice, scooped desperately the last minute, was aimed badly; it baptized a bewildered family, chiefly children, still looking for the obtrusively obvious exit.

"Good luck," Pelham's deeper tones echoed hers.

The oiled switches, affectionately clearing the way for the long iron carriage and its coupling hearts, creaked beneath them, as the cars slid and jangled down the yards, between the furnacetown shanties, into the winter-shriven suburban streets. Jane's placid smile followed her man as he joined two of the comfortable chairs; her hands locked within his, her cheek rested against the warm roughness of his, her eyes watched the flying world curtsey and part behind them, then gradually coalesce into a welded and blurred oblivion. They were turning their backs upon the mountain her Pelham loved; not for good ... yes, for good, but not for all time.

West Adamsville | 8.37|

The mountain was going with them; its inscrutable mass, off to the left, still followed, a protection and a reminder. What a boyish fancy of his, that it mothered him! Well, it could safely leave the task to her, Jane reflected; he was worth mothering--her first child.... A sudden freshet of tenderness lifted her arm around his shoulder.

This station they had just left--to think that its scattered home-lights held striving hearts who had followed her Pelham through the harsh campaign, and looked to him as children to their leader. And now he was hers, hers! And she would see to it that she kept him theirs.

Hers ... as she must be his. She dared to inch her fancies beyond their previous bounds. As a modern woman, she reminded herself, she knew from her reading the essential facts of mated life; but feelings were of different breed: words could not communicate unfelt emotions, they could only evoke memories of those formerly experienced. The emotional Atlantic lay before her.... To-night? She could not tell.

Coalstock | 8.57|

"What are you thinking of, dear?" she asked.

"Geographically.... Reminiscing.... Bragg County ends in a few miles; my last speech, before the final one in Main Park, was in the Elks' Hall here."

She looked with added interest at the bare platform, the forlorn pair of station idlers, the morose baggage man trundling away a lone trunk. He looked up as they passed, started, took off his hat to the recent candidate.

"I like that man," she declared inconsequentially. "He knows you."

The glassed spaces of the observation platform were small defense against the subtle penetration of the winter night. The bland porter navigated down the car aisles, bundling steamer blankets, which radiated inward the body's waves of heat.

"The old life dead, the glad new one born," her husband mused aloud. "Except a man become as a little child again----For it is a heaven we plan."

"A democracy, not a kingdom, dear?"

"Never a kingdom, unless with a queen equally powered; and no subjects. The old subserviences are dying; with us they are dead. A real equality of mating; the slave-woman attitude gone forever, as we are laboring on the mountain to end the slave-man attitude."

"It is a friendly old universe, dear, to fling us together, on the uncertain upwhirl of the lassoed earth, to complement each other...."

"Blossom to blossom, bird to bird, man to woman," he paired.

"Jackson in two hours," he went on, after a pause.

Was he consciously making conversation, to keep her mind off of what must be the burden of its agitated thinking, the growing tumult stirred and heightened by the night's resistless progress toward their own intimate morning? She appreciated the diversion; soon he was deep in the rich memories of easy Jackson days.

Her mind twisted over other matters at the same time. Marriage meant so little to a man, compared to what it meant to a woman! Pelham, she believed, was chaste; he had told her so. There was no way of knowing. But love accomplished changed woman irrevocably. It seemed unfair. She re-breathed a silent prayer that she would not find him coarse ... even a little. It had been disillusioned Dorothy who had warned her that all men were.... Not her man.

Twice the porter had opened the door with suggestive obtrusiveness; it must be nearly eleven. Shivering with a disquiet almost unbearable, she responded to the caressing modulations in his voice, as he told of his childhood; even though its warmth was caused by recollections of other arms than her own. His deep affection for his mother, despite the occasional flippancy he used now, was no secret to the wife.

The whistle wailed rhythmically across the level stubble fields.

His face lit up. "That was Newtown we whizzed by; my father started it. Hideous place!" But the tone was affectionate.

Jackson | 11.02|

He consulted his watch; they were running four minutes behind.

As the train picked up speed, his eyes bored the obscurity. "That dark place ... somewhere there is the road to Uncle Jimmy Barbour's farm. You'll see it all with me soon, dearest dear."

She looked ahead toward the darkness he indicated. Now they had plunged past it.

She heard the porter approach for the third time. Pelham's tone was a trifle uneven. "The stateroom's made up? Thanks very much. Will you call us in time for Pascagoula?"

Us!... Jane's heart thumped; she wondered if his ears could fail to hear it.

"Dearest," he said slowly, "will you go in?... I'll come in half an hour.... Will that be enough?"

Her reply was so low, she wondered if he could have heard. He held her to him for a moment, as if unhappy to lose one moment of her. And then she shut the door, and turned into the lighted isolation of the stateroom, soon to offer her to a panicky common publicity.

... She heard him open the outer door; her flurried fingers summoned the unbetraying darkness.

A. M.
Lower Peachtree | 4.10|

Jane stared out of the bare three inches of the misted window; she had raised the curtain that much. The train was gaining momentum again. The unbroken night sped by; only her imagination could give it form and life. The unbroken future lay ahead; drowsily she reflected that only her imagination, her shaping hand, could mold it to the heaven they both desired. Pelham was at last asleep ... her husband was asleep....

Her hand lowered the curtain again. Facing the chill blackness without the window, she tried to drowse off. At length she turned toward him, for the moment absent, yet still tangibly hers. She snuggled into the warmer place by his side, touching him to make sure he was still there.

MOBILE |Ar. 4.45|
MOBILE |Lv. 4.53|

There was no consciousness stirring in the breathing state-room, to note the stop and the few belated night-travelers for the western gulf region. But in their dreams these two, separated by sleep, were again united. There was a smile playing across Jane's cheek; and a deep content resting upon Pelham's face.

East Pascagoula | 7.01|

Pelham sat on the edge of a chair, his face downcast in mock despair. "You make me feel so useless, Jane! Not even a dress to hook up the back----"

Altering a final hatpin, she smiled a query to him. "Is it on straight, beloved? The train wobbles so.... Dresses were hooked up the back ten years ago; of course, you've had practice on Mother Judson's.... Stand up a moment." With great gravity she readjusted his stick-pin. "There!"

He pulled her to the window. "Look--Back Bayou! Though it's really a pudgy finger of the gulf. And schooners ... this side.... Isn't it gorgeous?"

The train, perched on a spidery trestle, crawled high above the sloshing waves, broken by blackened oyster-bed stakes and a skiff slapping against the dismembered head of a narrow pier. Seabirds rose in glancing curves, the red face of the sun lit the waters on both sides of the three-masters tacking out beyond Horn Island. Abruptly the water was blotted out at the end of the bridge by stumpy sedge fields, stretching to a fringe of low pines framing the sparkling water beyond ... then trim white houses. The train slowed.

Pascagoula | 7.13|

"Here we are," Pelham's joyful tones fathered the last of the luggage, laboriously lowered by the stout porter.

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 shell, 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 fishing colony, Deer Island's populous turtle farms, and the lighthouses and dismantled fort upon the sandy spit called Ship Island. Here they walked a beach littered with curled conchs, horseshoe crab shells, and debris from the deeper waters washed up for a glassy-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 spaces 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 passionate 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 God 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 relationship.

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 fishing catboats and tarry roping. She curled behind him on a solitary bale of cotton awaiting belated shipment, 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 shielded a lighted match to give new life to the moist brown mass 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--coarse. 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 entitled 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 hardships 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 platitude 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 competition; 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, shifting 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 classes blend into one class of worthy men and women----"

"Supermen?"

"Another way of saying it.... When exploitation is ended, when we produce for need and not profit, when a man's highest selfishness will be to serve all, not pile up a backyard hoard of gold. Call it socialism or what you please, it will come; it is self-planted by and in our soil. The mountain will win, in the long run, not for its despoiler, but for all of its red-handed, ore-stained children. Work will be distributed, life lengthened, wealth and joy evened----"

"A big program cut out for Mr. Pelham Judson!"

"Not for me, heavens, no! I can only do my little part. It will use me ... just as it has used poor Babe Cole, dead on the railroad track, or his brothers, dead in the explosion and the shooting; just as it uses even Dick Sumter, Henry Tuttle, incredible little Roscoe Little, whose judicial rompers are merely a materialization of the greed of the corporations. All of their rich thefts will be taken from them, when the scales have finally adjusted themselves...."

"Nice old earth!" She patted the post beside her affectionately. "Just like a big brown doggie! We think, and bother; and to it we are no more than irritations on its skin, or little insects bred of it there. Our stirring annoys it: Vesuvius and Pele, or an earthquake.... The old world sniffs and snuffles down the fenced sky, leashed to the sun, its rope always a little shorter.... And a good warm sleep to it at the end, before cold night sets in."

Pelham shook his head in despair. "You say it so much better than I--the final word...."

"Come on, if we're to take that trip to Lake Pontchartrain before night." She prodded him off the bale, linking a comradely arm within his. "You notice that woman's 'final' word, as always, is followed by man's lament that she says the last thing. No," as he sought to answer, "it needs no footnote. At least I have you to myself this week, before the mountain woos you from me again."

Tired by the flat miles of rice-fields, swamp-land, and bayou, they returned to the haven of the hotel. Pelham had the elevator wait while he secured an armful of local papers.

"Nothing from Adamsville," scanning the pages rapidly, unaware how the mountain still held him. "Nothing.... Here it is. Another fight, with the invariable demand for the militia."

"You don't think they'll----"

"I certainly hope not. That would cause a smash-up."

The week ended; the return began. Just above Lower Peachtree, they secured an early edition of the _Times-Dispatch_, and found that the strike shared first-page headlines with the elaborate plans for the iron city's semi-centennial. The attack was more serious than the out-of-town papers had reported. Two guards, three strike-breakers, and an uncertain number of strikers had been killed; John Dawson's indignant statement that the deputies had fired first, and without provocation, was smothered in the body of the story; while the front page heading quoted Judge Florence to the effect that the company saw no other way to stop bloodshed than by immediate presence of the soldiers. A hurried meeting of the Commercial Club backed up this demand.

"They'll try to wipe the boys out," groaned Pelham, bitterly. "They may have planted this fight, for an excuse. We must have won too many strike-breakers."

An inside page held an account of the conviction of Nils Jensen, Benjamin Wilson, Lafe Puckett and a negro named Moses Pike for attempting to dynamite the ramp opening.

"They're out for blood now," Pelham commented somberly, after reading the brief announcement.

"They won't get you for anything, dear?" she queried quickly.

"I don't believe so.... You never can tell."

On their arrival, he sent Jane home by taxi, and went at once to strike headquarters. Two men lay sleeping on a rug thrown into the corner, their faces gray and exhausted. A young miner, his arm bandaged, sat at the table with Spence and several others.

"Hello, Judson. Just in time for the big round," the lawyer greeted grimly.

They walked over to the window. "Two companies arrive to-night," Spence continued. "By to-morrow they'll proclaim martial law for the entire mountain district...." His tone grew shrilly significant. "That includes the place where the boys live now."

"What can we answer?"

The lawyer lifted wearied shoulders. "Do what we can. We won't quit, but----I saw what they did in '04, remember."

"No chance for justice from the soldiers? I know some of the boys in the local company----"

"My dear man, the company gave 'em new brass buttons, new rifles, new bullets! Where will they put those bullets, do you suppose? It's irony for you: most of the soldiers were once laborers; labor's money pays for their food and their rifles; and labor receives their fire. Of course, if we can avoid trouble----It's our only hope; we can win, if we can prevent a smash-up."

"What about Jensen?"

"I'm appealing; that'll tie it up for a year. But the cards are marked, and they are dealing."

Pelham escaped from the headquarters of suffering for a hurried trip out to the miners' tent settlement. On the way back, he saw in the state road ahead a familiar boyish figure; as he reached it, fourteen-year-old Ned turned and saw him.

"Hey, give us a lift, Pell!" The brother climbed in impetuously. "Didn't expect to see me, did you? Father's going to let me be a deputy, next year! Does the company let you use these roads?"

"This is a state road, Ned; it's as much mine as the company's."

"Gee, I thought they all belonged to the company! What do you know, Pell--Sue's getting married Friday!"

"So I read," rather crudely. "Is he a nice chap?"