Mountain Part 3

Precise Sue took him up at once. "Of course she isn't. Aunt Jane's very, very old, Pell. She's 'mos' a hunderd. Aren't you, Aunt Jane?"

The aged cook snorted contemptuously. "What I is, I is, Miss Susie. I'se gwine ter yer Uncle Derrell's, _I_ is."

The children gazed open-eyed. "Are you goin' to cook for him 'n' Aunt Eloise?" asked Pelham.

"Sho' I is, honey! Dey gotter have mah cookin', Mister Derrell he says."

The noise of the creaking wagons drawn up at the side door claimed the children's attention. They ran out to watch the first loading, hoping to be allowed to help.

Paul followed briskly, thoroughly at home as an executive, issuing his orders with precision. His active mind ranged even at this absorbing moment. Well, he was leaving a slate wiped clean! All of the Jackson investments had turned out finely; he has sold the real estate to advantage, so as to cover a large part of the mountain purchase money.

The street railway stock he was still carrying; its regular income furnished a safe fund to fall back upon.

After the last load had been urged away, he walked with Mary through the echoing emptiness.

"We've been happy here, Paul," she observed quietly.

"Mm ... yes. Did that box of books in the spare room go with the last load?"

He hurried up to make sure.

Mary saw the children into their heavy wraps--it was unusually chilly for a Jackson October--and young Ike drove them down to the Great Southern station in the old carriage. It had been sold to Shanley's Livery Stable--it would hardly be the thing in Adamsville; but the wife had had her way for once more, due to Paul's expansive satisfaction at the smooth-running plans, and they were to make their last trip as citizens of Jackson in the accustomed conveyance.

When they became settled in the train, Pelham retold to the sisters the story of his trip to the mountain. They had never seen it, and his colorful narrative fascinated. Mary listened attentively, adding an occasional touch.

Paul went forward into the smoking car. The Dixie Flier was a political exchange for the state, just before the legislature met. There was always some one to listen, though usually unconvinced, to his insistence on the future prosperity of this dormant section. Mary heard his nervous, energetic laugh sound out, when the train stopped at some crossroads station to pick up a giggling group of ginghamed farm-girls and stooped country elders.

The children were quiet now. Across the aisle the baby lay with his head in Nell's lap; Sue was stretched out on the seat facing them, flushed cheek pillowed on cindery hand, brown eyes closed. Pell sat beside his mother, his dreamy face pressed against the smudged car pane, watching the flickering landscape sway by.

They were beautiful ... her children. But the cost to her ambitions had been heavy. Her vague dreams of a career, cherished while she was at art school, had been shoved far into the future. She realized, with a sigh, that she could never overtake them. Perhaps some one of the children,--perhaps the little son at her side,--would show the same talent; in him she might realize her own hid longings.

It hurt her to leave the quiet home town she had always known and loved, for the restless, youthful city, big with the future. It was the second time that she had felt wholly uprooted from her former life. Home days with Paul and his urging aggressiveness were vastly different from the placid, considerate atmosphere of the old Barbour plantation. There, a sharp word had been unknown. Her kindly, courtly father, the sweet quiet mother, the gay-hearted brothers and sisters,--there was an unbridgeable chasm between these and the push of her married life.

And now again a change....

Paul had a grasp of things, a will to shove his way over all obstacles, a single-ideaed vision of a high goal, that, she believed, could not fail to win for him the success that he sought. She sometimes wondered if the gentler bringing-up that had been hers would not have been better for the children. But that could not happen. They, she, were to be a part of the swell, the hurried, a.s.sertive course of Adamsville. She was glad she would be there to guard her little ones: they would need all she could do.

A long whistle woke her from her reverie. She looked out; the dusk had softened the countryside until it was a dull blur, shot with irregular streaky lights.

Her husband shouldered briskly back from the smoking car. "This is Hazelton, Mary," he said eagerly. "Adamsville next!"

IV

The Judsons blended easily into the life on the mountain.

Paul took it upon himself to plan and arrange all the details of the new home. Mary found her wishes unconsulted, when furniture was to be placed or purchased.

Much of the furnis.h.i.+ngs of the Jackson house he used in the new "Hillcrest Cottage." The dining-room suite, with its stately, ornate sideboard and carved chairs, was rearranged in the bay-windowed corner room, overlooking the long vista of Bragg Valley. The diners looked out on the pigmy furnace smokestacks punctuating the dun smoke-mist. The children's rooms, the three chief bedrooms, and the living-room furniture remained unaltered.

Upon the other things, Paul put down his foot. The library set, its antique bookcases and desks curling up toward the ceiling, must be relegated to the attic. The mahogany and bird's-eye maple suite, which had furnished the spare bedroom, must accompany it. The family portraits, the china heirlooms, and the odd judge's musty home library, in the same crates in which they had come from Jackson, were pushed into the odd-shaped angles of the twilight garret. These had no place in the elaborate simplicity of a country home.

The study and library were fitted up afresh in dull quartered oak, with sectional bookcases. New porch chairs and lounges for the wide verandas, Persian rugs for the rooms where the old carpets would not suffice, he listed, viewed, and finally purchased. Mary's heart ached these days as she realized how she had been pushed out of his living.

The phone rang one afternoon. "I'm sending out a rug for the library, Mary. Abramson's promised to get it there before five."

"Did you look at the one at Hooper's I told you about?"

"We'll talk about that when I get home." He rang off sharply.

Mary had it spread out before he arrived. It was a beauty, she thought ruefully; but it must have cost a mint. And it didn't go too well with the new bookcases and desk.

Paul reached home a little early, tired and cross from a big deal that had hung fire for ten days. "Well, how do you like it?"

"It's a lovely piece of goods. How much was it? The tag was off."

He walked in to observe it, altering its angle slightly. "It's just what we wanted. I think we'll have another for the parlor, too." He ignored her anxious eyes, and she did not press the question.

On Sundays Nathaniel Guild usually dropped in, for a stroll over the place, after a breakfast of eggs, bacon, and coffee at seven.

There was so much they must plan together; this could be done only on the ground. Paul, of course, was living on the mountain, and his share in the land was much the larger; but both were interested in the projected development, the wide boulevards curving with the contour of the ground, the advantageous grouping of sites naturally adapted to sloping lawns and well-placed residences.

"You see, Nate, every shrub I set out, every walk we put in, every flight of steps, will increase the value, when we put it on the market."

"Waiting a few years,----"

"Now's the time to begin. Adamsville is spreading fast; it's course is bound to be this way. East Highlands is _the_ residence section now----"

"I see Mrs. Friedman's building on Haviland Avenue----"

"And three new houses to go up on East Thirtieth!"

"... It'll take a lot of money." His eyes roamed reflectively over the gray, jagged outcrop, almost concealed by a tangle of grape and blackberry vines and rangy sumach bushes.

Paul tugged vindictively at a nettle that had encroached upon the path winding up to the house,--he carried his garden gloves for just such purposes. "It'll be cleared before next summer,--all this half of it."

On weekday mornings the master of the mountain was up earlier, hoeing the flower beds that frilled the verandas, and seeing to the setting out of trees and vines. After seven o'clock, he superintended the gangs of negro laborers who were filling and grading the gap road, and the extensions that bent down to the railroad spur on the west.

At times, that first winter, there were more than forty workmen remolding the mountain's resisting face. Quartz blasted from the quarry above the tracks, on the Logan land, made a permanent roadbed. The winter's settling would have it ready for the final surface of dirt after the spring rains. The negroes worked for a dollar a day; and Paul often observed disgustedly, after inspection of the day's work, that four-fifths of the job had been done before eight-thirty, when he left for the office in the city.

Pelham, just beyond his ninth birthday, found his spare time provided for. He spent his afternoons and Sat.u.r.days a.s.sisting in the overseeing of the grading. His father believed in getting him to work young. The mountain would be his some day,--his and his brother's and sisters',--it was none too soon to begin now to learn its problems.

When not at school, he was started in, before six o'clock, at weed-picking. Nell and Sue, and even the baby, could help here, when the work was near the house. In order to give a material incentive, the children were paid one cent a bucket for the weeds. Their earnings were banked with their mother, who kept the accounts in a little red book, an object of especial reverence to the involuntary depositors.

Pelham was especially sharp at locating the big weeds, their roots matted with moist earth, and spreading fan-like over the rocks never far below the surface. Five or six of these, and his bucket was full. Then he would lie on his back, dreaming, his body registering, through the blue cotton pants and thin s.h.i.+rt, each rock and hump on the ground. He followed the clouds sailing, like misty Argoes, over the placid blue sea of sky; he watched the crimson-capped woodp.e.c.k.e.rs tapping industriously at a nearby oak or hickory trunk, or the bouncing flight of flickers from clump to clump of bluegum and white-gum, or the distant descending spirals of a lazy buzzard, answering some noisome summons to a hidden and hideous feast.