Mountain Part 35

"I'll leave by Sat.u.r.day."

Paul turned away. "It will be a good thing."

His soul stinging with the father's injustice, he waited until the other had gone in leisurely certainty down the hill, and went in to his mother. "I'm to leave the mountain next Sat.u.r.day, mother."

"It's necessary, Pelham. You have distressed your father in so many ways, I cannot see anything else for you to do."

Hurt pride spoke within him. "He said my late hours set a bad example for the boys."

"Yes ... that too...."

The words crowded out. "He said that I was late because I was going with bad companions, when he knows that's a lie!"

"Pelham, you shall not speak that way of your father to me."

"Mother, you know I've been at meetings and debates; you know how straight I've been. If he'd had his way, I wouldn't have been," he added with heated significance.

"What do you mean?" The unrehea.r.s.ed query came against her will.

"When I was visiting at the Meades, he advised me to go to Butler's Avenue, mother--to go to the Red Light district--to go to the women there. That was his fatherly advice to me!"

Her face a.s.sumed a Puritanic severity, an alien look; she masked the tumult of her heart with this outward symbol of incredulity. "I cannot believe you, Pelham."

This was not the first occasion in which he had detected Mary's mobile features solidified into a harsh and unreasoning insensibility to fact.

Whenever he or one of the other children had cornered the mother into a situation demanding condemnation of Paul, this self-gorgonized expression hardened upon her; it hid any admission of surprise, any criticism of the husband, for the moment. And he had observed that it served a second function--persisted in, it gave time for the breach in the confidence in Paul to heal without apparent scar; henceforth she seemed to live in the self-imposed delusion that her husband had never been at fault. She would have held as a model wife the Red Queen, who had trained herself to believe six impossible things--presumably to her royal husband's advantage--before each breakfast.

Pelham had come to despise this obvious scouting of reality, this sentimentalizing which called facts what it would have them, not what they were. He retorted rather sharply, "There's no use not believing me.

You know I am not lying; those were my father's words."

The smug overcast of unbelief became glacial; in serene security in her husband's impeccability, no matter what the facts might be, she turned toward the house. "I do not wish to have you discuss the matter any further." Then, a softer look in her eyes, she came back to where the son stood, and slipped an arm around his shoulder. "I'm doing this for your own best interest, mother's dearest boy; just as your father has decided in his wisdom that the time has come when you must leave the cottage."

There was a preliminary catch in her voice, affectionate, affecting, and not consciously affected. "G.o.d only knows, my son, how much I love you...." She did not say any more, as if with a moment's clarity of insight she doubted the appropriateness of the inevitable formula. She threw a half-puzzled glance at him, that seemed rather to survey herself through him, as she left off talking, pa.s.sed up the steps, and through the screen door--for all the world as if to screen herself further from his, and perhaps her own, searching scrutiny.

Well, that was ended. Pelham prepared to move. He found a vacant room with Mrs. Hernandez, wife of a comrade. The outlook on symmetrical suburban homes, in a cheap section near the mountain's foot, was far different from the rolling vistas he had been so fond of; but at least his books and Sheff pictures reminded of the old place.

Jim Hewin, whose attentions to Diana continued, although without his first impetuous insistence, questioned the girl about the matter on one of their infrequent meetings under the dumb oaks on the crest. "Young Judson left home?"

"Last week."

"Squabbled with his old man?"

"I reckon so.... He just left." She continued listlessly to stare at the burning breath of the far furnaces.

At length her moping could not be ignored. "What's the matter, gal?

What's on your mind?" He tried lightly to shake her out of her melancholy.

She responded weakly to his clumsy friendliness, her tongue locked as to its real trouble. She had come to-night to tell him; it seemed so easy, as she went over the matter in the cleared kitchen, waiting for the supper preparations to begin. She must tell him; he was ent.i.tled to know.

And now an icy self-disgust tied her. This man at her side--what could it mean to him, but a new peg for his obscene jokes? She had gone into this thing, at the last, willingly; she must see it through. It was not for him to guess at the faint unstirring life which her mad yielding had summoned within her.

She pretended to meet his mood, and left him sure that she had "got out of her spell." She cried herself and her hidden secret to sleep.

A spirit of la.s.situde lay over the mountain activities, with the departure of Pelham and the c.u.mulative effect of drenched days of torrid July suns.h.i.+ne. The dusty mornings were dry and crackly, the sullen summer air clung within the house at night. Futile breezes spurted uncertainly, emphasizing the arid discomfort. Twice thunder clouds ma.s.sed over the nervous swelter, but were swept on before they could spill their desired comfort. Dust-weighted leaves hung limp, shrubs sickened and browned; only the weeds pushed blatantly upward.

Paul came out early the second day of the spell. The weight of the weather was unbearable. It was as if heavy blankets of heat were continually drifting down from the blazing heaven, too piercingly hot to be drowsy; it was as if he walked through these thick palpable layers of living, seering fire ... like walking undersea of a vast liquid ocean of seething heat.

"You'd better get out of this," he announced shortly to Mary. "How would the Thousand Islands do?... The girls, and Ned too; his school doesn't open till late in September. Hollis had better stay with me; I need some help.... Shall I make reservations for Tuesday?"

Paul took Hollis with him, ten days later, for a run up to Was.h.i.+ngton connected with the delivery of steel to supply Allied orders, a mission in which all of his driving sympathies were enlisted. Nor was he out of key with his home city in this. Adamsville was one of the few Southern cities whose sympathies had been against the Central Powers from the beginning of the war. For the first two years the rest of the South fussed and thundered against English interference with the profitable pre-war cotton trade with Germany; an anti-English "freedom of the seas"

became the day's slogan in the one section of the country where English blood still predominated. But the iron city never joined in this clamor; its spokesmen, its suave senators and publicists, could waive the blockaded deflection of cotton, when the iron and steel demands of the Entente doubled the output of the mineral region. As the warring months marched on, quick s.h.i.+pments commanded untold bonuses; as of old, where a man's purse was, there was his heart. For commercial and patriotic reasons the company fretted impotently at the continuance of the strike at this time, especially when rail congestion became serious throughout the country. Paul's trip was one of many that the metal magnates had to make, to keep the wheels running as smoothly as possible upon the twice interrupted tracks.

This trip left the mountain home in the care of old Peter, who stayed on in his cluttered servant's room behind the kitchen. Diana Cole came in to clean up once or twice a week. Jim Hewin's persistent curiosity about the movements of the Judsons found full answer in her.

Two days after the master's departure, Peter hitched up and drove into town, to bring out two boxes of books from the office, and some sacks of cotton seed meal and oats. He dawdled around from store to store, showing off his temporary responsibility and dignity. The hot hours pa.s.sed; he found relief in the cool shade of a side of the ice factory, where frequent squabbles among intent young negro c.r.a.p-shooters were referred to him for his ponderous adjustments.

Diana, late in the afternoon, brought a pan of peas out to the mended yellow rocker on the front porch of the Cole shack, and commenced popping the viscid spheres out of the parched pods. At length her hands slowed; she stared into the red sunset beyond Hillcrest Cottage on the hill across.

She was struck by the odd reflection of the fiery glow in the kitchen windows. It was as if the late sun shone clear through the house. She rose agitatedly to her feet, the peas littering the steps, the pan halting against the wilted morning-glory vines. "Maw!" she cried, panic in her voice. "Maw! Will! Come here----"

A thin s.h.i.+mmer of smoke jerked restlessly above the kitchen end of the big house. "That ain't--fire?"

"An' Mr. Paul an' ev'ybody gone!"

"Will," she turned hurriedly, "run to Hewintown--the men can save lots.

I'll phone the Fire Department----"

She raced up the familiar road, her mind working feverishly. Far behind Stella panted. There had been no fire in the kitchen range since morning, when Peter cooked his own bacon and coffee. At noon it had been cold; she had seen it; Peter had started then for town.... Unless he had come back.

The sun had almost gone down; it was dark in the hall. She threw open the doors, and started frantically tugging at Miss' Mary's chiffonier and washstand. The men arrived, coatless, willing. They piled furniture around the big cedar north of the house. The heat of this burning wing became blistering; the things had to be moved down the road.

Diana remembered the telephoning.

"We got an alarm," a gruff voice scolded. "Engines ought to be there now."

Two neighbors from the base of the mountain came up, and began helping.

Armed guards at the entrances to the estate kept many away; these watched the holocaust from beyond the gap, or from their own homes.

Dried wooden walls flamed up against the dark sky like giant fireworks; ma.s.sed smoke bellied and spit sparks as if the mountain vomited in fiery discomfort.

Someone led a group of helpers up to the dim door of the garret, crowded with carefully covered family treasures from Jackson days. The dusty packing-cases promised little. "Nothing here," he said, closing the door.

The north end was an oven now; the rescuers turned to the dining room, parlors, and the boys' rooms on the south.

Diana ran back to the closet where Miss' Mary's silver was locked. She left this to hurry to the window, and then the door.

Huggins, Jim Hewin, and a knot of guards stared at the hectic activity.

"Hey, n.i.g.g.e.rs," one called to Will Cole and another, who were steering the hall clock from the Jackson home through the door, "drop that clock.

You can't steal Mr. Judson's things."

Will and the other reached the porch.