"Mm ... maybe."
"But--to leave Jackson!"
He grew argumentative, with an expansive selflessness. "It's only fair
to the children to give them the wider chance. There are nice people in
Adamsville ... big people."
Her every objection was met by an urgent answer; she resigned herself at
last to his insistent determination. Sometimes, lately, she had felt a
little afraid of this masterful husband, the incarnation of courtesy
away from home, the slave-driver with his family. His father had been
the same type, as Paul had once reminded her. It stirred in his blood;
Derrell and Pratt, the older brothers, had ordered him around, as a boy,
as dictatorially as if he were a negro; he, in turn, had bossed the
neighboring children, and the servants. "Bred in the bone," Mary had
once said to her mother. "He can cover it; he can't change it."
On occasion, he was considerate and tender; but if there was work to be
done, he attacked it with impetuous ferocity. Negroes, children, even
his wife, became tools to be picked up, used, and laid down as quickly.
In her heart Mary resented the attitude, even while defending it to her
family.
It was in this mood that he plunged at the acquisition of the mountain
lands, and the planning of the new house. Mary found little of the
chummy spirit that had warmed the first few married years; instead, the
hold that the hill had taken upon his imagination intensified his usual
dominance. Adamsville, the mountain, called him. He had a recurring,
varying vision of the iron city brought to the feet of the mountain; of
country estates climbing up to his crest home, overlooking the whole
city, the state, the South. He saw himself filling coveted public
offices.... The shifting details spurred his determination. With the
mountain his, he could do anything, be anything.... He gave slack rein
to these fancies; for he knew that man spent more hours upon these
preparatory visions, desire-spun solitaire conversations and imaginary
victories, than upon any other activity: even sleep was filled with a
continuation of the day's longings, altered but unmistakable. He would
differ from the usual man in that he would drive or bend to completion
these airy plannings.
His secret dreams he shared with no one. Mary may have suspected their
existence, from his silent spells of brow-knitted thought, but he denied
her the confidence her cordial sympathy had hoped for. His desire
blueprinted the future unassisted.
At times he sought to weigh this push that quickened his nature. He
began to think of himself as one of the iron men out of whom the New
South was being forged, painfully but surely. He was a Judson in all of
it; but he possessed, more than the rest, a driving ambition too strong
to be satisfied with the unfruitful life of a Southern aristocrat.
Changing conditions were rapidly eliminating this impossible and
antiquated incongruity. He was more than a Judson. His nature reacted
away from the typical Southern vices, which neither of his brothers had
escaped. He was continent, even in drinking. The endless object lesson
that had been given him by his crotchetty old father, who toward the
last drank himself into a daily querulousness, was not lost on the son.
Paul rarely took even a toddy; and the clear mind that this gave should
be of value in whatever harsh, lean years might follow.
All of his energy went toward the mountain. It was Mary whose
embroidering fancy christened the new home "Hillcrest Cottage," on her
one visit to the place, just before the completion of the interior.
Beyond this, she found her counsel unheeded in the designing, even in
the complicated arrangements for the moving.
What a time is moving! A self-willed chaos to familiar routines and
associations, an involuntary revisiting of dead hours and buried
sensations. It brings an endless plowing up of forgotten once-hallowed
trifles, which the fond heart would fain reject, but can not; it is a
rooted and ample world fitted into packing cases, hustled and baled into
temporary death. The old life was and is not, the new life is still to
begin. It warns of the shaky foundations beneath rooted habitudes; and
at the same time calls forth adventure and daring in the soul of man.
Such thoughts thronged Paul Judson's mind, in disjointed sequence, as
his busy steps took him through the large littered rooms of the family
mansion. He wore his old garden shoes, stained by grass and lime,
scuffed by cinders: a pair of carefully patched brown woolen trousers,
the lower half of a once prized suit; and a blue-figured shirt, turned
to a V at the neck, with a green paint blotch on one side which
strenuous laundryings had not been able to efface. A wall mirror gave
him a passing reflection of himself; he smiled as he pictured what would
have been his father's horror at such ungentlemanly garb. Boxes of
books, ropes for the extra trunks, piles of straw for the china--all
these must be arranged under his eyes. He packed the fragile Haviland
and the shaped fish set, used only on unusual occasions, with his own
hands. He knew negroes; you couldn't trust them with a thing.
He looked irritably under lumped old quilts, piles of table linen, and
cloth-shielded pictures. "Mary!" he demanded, sharply.
"Yes, dear?" She dropped what she had been doing at once.
A free hand gestured nervously. "The hammer--I had it just a moment
ago."
An experienced gaze interrogated the room. It was the ninth call for
that hammer since breakfast had been cleared away.
Just beyond the door an empty packing-case gaped. She put her hand on
the missing implement, cached within it.
The troubled line left his forehead. "We'll take the pictures next," he
said curtly, bending again to his task.
Mary Judson stood watching his efficient activity. She had stayed
unnoticed at his elbow nearly all the morning, to anticipate these
calls. He continued hammering energetically, unconscious of her
observation.
He straightened his still youthful shoulders a moment, to lift a stack
of heavy books from the mantel. Paul Judson, as she loved best to
remember him, furnished the food for her musings; they dwelt in
haphazard inconsecutiveness upon his erect figure at the head of the
Decoration Day line of his company, upon his ardent face bending over
tiny Pelham's crib, upon his wry expression yesterday while she bandaged
a cut wrist; then to the alien admiration her kindly brother felt for
the husband's driving vitality.
"Mary, did you get those quilts to cover the piano?" His crisp query
broke into her thoughts.