At the far end of the waiting-room,--it lacked half an hour to
train-time,--he saw at once the slight figure. Pelham had invested in a
bag of bananas, and was disconsolately eating the second. As he saw his
father's figure approaching, he wilted weakly back in the seat.
"Going away, Pelham?"
"Yes, sir."
He was surprised at the lack of interest in his father's voice.
The older man sat down beside him, and spoke carefully. "As soon as you
want to leave home, Pelham, you may. If you're going to Jackson, or
anywhere else, father'll be glad to write on and see that you get a job
of some kind. But you are pretty small to be starting out now."
The boy choked a wordless assent.
"I think you'd better come home to-night, and think over the matter. If
you want to go to-morrow, I'll be glad to help."
Pelham rose obediently, clutching the draggled bundle, and slipped a
confiding hand into his father's. Nothing was said about the whippings;
they ceased.
V
When summer came, Pelham spent his vacation at Grandfather Barbour's
home. He made the journey alone, in the conductor's care.
Joyfully he hopped out at the station, and drove up the leisurely oak
avenue to the big house. He had his own cool little room again, fragrant
with the honeysuckle blossoms beneath the window, and the scent of peach
blossoms from the near end of the orchard.
Every summer that he could remember, he had spent with these adored
grandparents. Edward Barbour and his young wife had come to Jackson two
decades after the first Judson. At first their home had been only a
large bedroom and dining-room. Then a porch had been added, and two more
rooms to the south, where the orchard began now. The first pantry had
been the piano box, connected by a shed to the kitchen and back porch.
The north wing had followed, and the upstairs,--until now the sectional
house fitted so well into the trees and vines, that it seemed to have
sprouted and grown as easily and naturally as they.
His cousins, Alfred, his own age, and Lil, a year younger, came up every
day while he stayed here; Uncle Jimmy's house was visible beyond the
last pear tree, down nearer the Greenville Road.
There were strawberries in the garden, big luscious fruit soppy with the
dew and gleaming like scarlet Easter eggs in the damp leaves.
He learned to help old Dick harness up the buggy, or watched 'Liza
spurt the warm creamy milk pattering into the wide-mouthed pails.
After breakfast, Grandma let him trowel in the pansy or salvia
beds,--her flowers were the talk of the neighbors,--and she gave him a
little bed of his own, where portulacca, larkspur, sticky petunias,
star-flowered cypress vines, and rose-geranium and heliotrope slips
formed a crowded kaleidoscope of shape and color.
There were other occupations for restless mind and fingers. His father
might have laughed at his sewing, and openly despised him for it. But
Grandmother took time from her embroidery to teach him the briar-stitch
and cat-stitch, and the quick decoration of the chain. His mother kissed
the grimed, badly embroidered pansy and wild-rose squares that were
folded into his occasional happy notes.
On rainy days the children played indoors. Spools,--was there ever such
a house for spools! Grandmother had been saving them since the war.
Endless cigar boxes rattled with spools of all sizes, big red linen
thread ones, handy middle-sized ones, baby silk-twist bobbins. These
were emptied upon the sitting-room floor: houses, trains, forts, whole
cities flourished in the narrow boundaries of the rag carpet.
Grandfather kept crayons, scissors, and a store of old Scribners' and
Harpers', which were his without pleading. And parchesi boards, and
backgammon--the place was a paradise to the boy.
He delighted in long rambles with his grandfather. The old gentleman,
after the war, had combined managing his small farm with running the
main village store in Jackson. He had long given up the latter; his
simple, honest Christian methods of dealing with his neighbors had been
supplanted by more up-to-date ethics, although the store's old name was
preserved.
The two visited the corn and cotton fields behind the house, the level
swards of the pebbly river, the solemn privetted walks throughout the
cemetery. Here generations of dead Jacksonians restfully scattered into
the prolific, dusty mother that gave them birth.
Pelham learned much on these walks,--the birds, trees, stories of dead
heroes, episodes of the war, and the stirring times when the raiders had
overrun the village. Grandmother had hidden two brothers, one wounded,
for weeks in her cellar, all unknown to the Northern visitors who forced
themselves upon her. The boy absorbed indiscriminately the accumulated
store of eighty years of active life.
After supper, the sweet-faced grandmother would slip a knitted wrap over
his shoulders, and walk out with him in the great oak-surrounded square
before the house. She taught Pelham how to find the North Star, from the
bottom of the Big Dipper; and then the Little Dipper, that had been
twisted back until the Milky Way spilled from it. He learned to
recognize the big Dragon waddling across the summer heavens, and many of
the dwellers in the strange skyey menagerie. These were days and nights
of wonder and beauty.
He longed to stay here forever, away from the acidity of his father's
commands, and the ever-present fear of the belt. But as the autumn came,
he wept his farewells and went back.
Until his return from that first absence at Jackson, he did not realize
how the mountain had claimed him. He maintained a mild, glowing regard
for the grandparents' plantation; it was free from the irksome paternal
irritations that scarred his home days. But its appeal did not go down
to the deepest parts of him.
With the mountain it was different. Not merely Hillcrest Cottage,
although he felt bound to every board and stone of it; not even merely
the Forty Acres, the family name for the fenced, pathed, and parked
half of the original eighty on which the house stood; but the whole
mountain, its rises and unexpected hollows, and the thicketed valleys
that drooped sharply away toward the East,--he responded to all of
these. The rest of the Judsons had taken the cottage and the Forty as
their home. But this was only a small part of home to the eldest son.
The mountain became his castle, his playground, his haven of refuge, the
land of his fancy. He was its child, and it was his mother.
He got along better with his father that winter. Diligent application to
his school work and his tasks at home was the price of liberty on the
mountain. Two weekday afternoons, and Sunday after midday dinner, were
allowed him. He filled every minute of these respites.
The little Barbour cousins spent Thanksgiving week with the children.
Pelham showed them all the treasured spots on the mountain. To them,
even the walk up the hill was an adventure, as they explored the long
sloping dummyline road, through stiff palisades of golden rod and
Flora's paint-brush, the stalks silver-dusty from the nipping November
winds, and ready to scatter at the tentative poking of a rotting stick,
or the breath of a skimmed stone.
One wonderful picnic they had to Shadow Creek, before the relatives
returned home. All drove over in a wagon to the deserted mill dam, Aunt
Sarah, grumbling her good-humored threats to return to Jackson and leave
"dis mountain foolishness," riding along to mind the children. Jimmy
learned the first few swimming strokes in the cool, brownish pond;
Pelham and the older girls had long been going in regularly with their
father, and were fast becoming expert.
A baby came in April,--another boy, named Edward after Mary's father.
This kept the mother from joining their rambles, so it was necessary for
Pelham to devise the games without her resourceful assistance.
Here the boy's impelling imagination, added to his knowledge of fairy
stories, came to his aid. All the myth-creating urge of the past moved
in him. He peopled the varied crests and valleys with these volatile
companions, visible only in the dusk out of the corner of a friendly
eye. The V-shaped slope from the gap to the railroad was Dwarfland;
Hollis was their prince. Crenshaw Hill, clear to the Locust Hedge, was
Yellow Fairyland; a chum, Lane Cullom, a year older than Pelham, assumed
leadership over these beings. Black-haired Nell, when she could be got
to play, was the princess of the Black Fairies, whose haunts were in the
outcrop before Hillcrest Cottage. Sue was anything needed to complete
the story,--a mere mortal, the queen of the moon-fairies, or of the rock
gnomes. Pelham, himself, in crimson outing flannel cloak, was the king
and lord of the Red Fairies. They were the real spirits of the mountain,
and of fire, and came in their red chariots down the flaming lanes of
the sunset sky, to battle for their dispossessed heritage against all
the forces of night and darkness.
The fights were not all bloodless. On one of these assaults, as he
charged with brittly reed lances up the precipitous quartz quarry, he
stumbled and drove a stiff bit of stubble into a nostril. It bled
furiously, until his stained handkerchief was the hue of his crimson
mantle. But even the three stitches which the doctor took were only an
incident in the noble warfare.
The endless sieges, ambuscades, tourneys and adventures filled
volumes--literally volumes; for Pelham wrote, on folded tablet paper, a
history of the fairy occupation of the mountain, copiously illustrated
with pencil and crayon. It was one of the regrets of his later years
that this history had disappeared completely; even its details vanished
from his memory.
Always he directed the sports. They varied with his invention;
spear-tilting at barrel hoops around the circle of the daisy bed, bow
and arrow warfare at Indian enemies hulking and skulking behind
pokeberry bushes, cross-country running to Shadow Creek and back, when
he became interested in this at the high school,--these were only a few
of the games.
His name-giving had a curiously permanent effect. Dwarfland never lost
the title he gave it, nor Billygoat Hill, where he and Lane surrounded a
patriarchal billy and almost caught him.
When his father became busied with planning the subdivision of the
mountain lands, to throw them upon the market, the imitative boy divided
Crenshaw Hill into "Coaldale the Second." He borrowed, without
permission, enough deeds and mortgages from the real-estate office to
run his city for a year, and acted as seller, probate judge, and
clearing gang. The streets, two feet wide, were carefully walled from
the lots by the loose outcrop stones. There was a hotel, a court house,
a furnace, and multiplying homes and stores.
Finally the sisters and brother lost interest, since only Pelham could
untangle the intricacies of the allotments. It was all cleared away
three years later by a real clearing gang, although this part of the
hill continued to be called Coaldale Second.
The mountain was a lonely place for children, after all. Even though
Lane braved the temporary isolation, and the girls occasionally had
spend-the-day parties at the cottage, it was usually deserted except for
Pelham and his imaginary companions.
He learned all of its moods. There was the plentiful springtime, when it
blossomed a flood of unexpected beauty. Rich summer brought
blackberries, dewberries, and hills rioting with azalea and jasmine.
Autumn furnished muscadines by the creek beds, hydrangeas, and the
sudden glory of changing leaves. Winter was a black-boughed
multiplication of the hilly vistas.
The boys lived in dog-tents several summers. Old Peter built them a tree
house in a big oak near a fallen wild cherry tree; when they slept here,
the floor rocked and swung all night; they were like sailors buoyed upon
a sea of restless leaves. Thus the nights revealed the mountain as
personally and intimately as the days.
This close contact with it had another effect. It cut Pelham off
effectually from the city boys, and forced him to a high degree of
self-reliance, both as to body and mind. The wiry legs toughened, the
arms grew long and able to swing him from bough to bough of the big
trees, the shoulders spread strongly apart. His surplus energy was
transmuted into an adaptable, powerful body.
Greater than this was the other effect. He felt safe, with the mountain
as ally; not even his father could touch him, in its secret haunts. An
unconscious sense of self-completeness, a rooted belief in his own and
every person's liberty, became an integer of his faith.
Thus he grew away from all other people, except his mother. To her he
was drawn closer, particularly when her relationship with Paul grew
strained. This had been especially obvious after the birth of Ned, the
fifth baby; the father had had sharp words with Mary about it.
"It was all right for Mother Barbour to have six; people had more
children then. Two of them died, anyhow. It's different now."
"But, Paul,----" The calloused injustice of it silenced her.
He watched her averted face. "I see Mamie Charlton's getting divorced.
Jack got tired of her and her eternal children. I saw her the other
day.... She's getting old. Too many children responsible for it."
She flinched dumbly before his brutality.
He spoke savagely, through clenched teeth. "It's your fault. You ought
to be more careful."
Her womanhood rose in rebellion. "Any time you're tired of me,
Paul,----"
"It's easy to talk." He laughed abruptly. "And since the business is
doing so well, there are always younger women,----"
He did not finish--her look silenced him.
With no woman to confide in, Mary turned to her son, rather than to the
girls. His whole horizon was filled with love for her mellow brown-eyed
beauty, and for the mothering mountain that came to stand for her in his
fancies.
On the walks with his father, Paul's mind was filled with thoughts of
the planned development of the land for residential purposes, while
Pelham was busied with fantasies of fairies and knightly escapades.
Father and son were continually jarring over little things; the
estrangement widened.
"I think we'll continue the gap road as an avenue to the railroad
tracks. Logan Avenue, we'll call it. Mr. Guild thinks that would be a
good place."
"Down Dwarfland?"
The father was plainly irritated. "'Dwarfland' ... what poppycock! Why
can't you get your head down to business, Pelham?"
He would meekly smother his wandering imagination, and listen to long
monologues about grading, restricted allotments, and similar boring
topics.
The father's sympathy went no further than to approve, in the boy, the
things which the man himself liked. His son should naturally take to
those things which the father cared for. Fishing trips to Pensacola or
beyond Ship Island, which Pelham enjoyed more for the novelty of scenes
and faces than for the tedious sport, called forth Paul's gusty
admiration when the boy succeeded in holding to a game mackerel, or in a
skillful handling of spade fish or mullet. The boy's undistinguished
prowess in swimming and tennis, his fumbling success with a shotgun
after bull-bats or meadow larks, were magnified in the father's eyes.
The pleasures that Pelham devised for himself were scoffed at. The
imaginative reliving of knightly days or frontier activities was as
distasteful to Paul's matter-of-fact mind as the embroidering at
Grandmother Barbour's. The boy's collecting craze found no response in
the parent; when the haphazard interest in tobacco tags, street-car
transfers and marbles gave way to a real absorption in stamps, that
consumed the son's spare money and time voraciously, Paul issued a ukase
on the subject. "Get rid of them. Collect money, as I do, if you want to
collect anything."
Pelham rehashed his arguments. "They teach you geography, and
history...."
"They're trash; cancelled stamps, worth nothing."
"People pay lots for some stamps."
"You've got something else to think about. Sell 'em, or give 'em away;
get rid of 'em. You understand?"
Pelham finally sold them to a local barber, from whom he had bought many
of the unused South American specimens. "Sure, I buy 'em," Mr. Lang
smiled. He went through the scanty pages, repeating all his stock jokes:
"You're a guy, and a pair of guys," as Uruguay and Paraguay were
reached, being his favorite. "They're not worth much to me. Tell you
what, I give you thirty-two dollars."
The boy had to be content with this.
Less than a year later, he surreptitiously bought back the collection
for forty, keeping them concealed in a corner of the attic.
The third summer brought weekly target practice upon the mountain. This
grew out of a lynching at nearby Coaldale, following a brutal assault
upon a white miner's wife by a negro. The Judson arsenal contained three
rifles, several shot guns, and half a dozen revolvers; they were all put
into use in the hollow behind Crenshaw Hill. The girls of course took
part, and Mary, a good shot, thereafter carried her pistol in her
handbag whenever she went to the foot of the hill. An exaggerated
account of this spread among the negroes; only the boldest vagrant would
think a second time of daring the unerring gunfire of the Judsons.
This constant reminder of the danger to women, from men, drove the boy's
mind to consider this problem. Pelham had matured slowly; his mother had
been his chief sweetheart, as long as he could remember. But the
association with girls at the new Highlands High School made the matter
more personal to him. With eager avidity he took to whatever reading he
could find upon the subject. There were pages in his presentation Bible,
and in an old "Lives of the Popes," that were creased and yellowed from
his frequent reading.
Occasional newspaper stories moved him strangely. He lay awake almost
all of one night, on the canvas cot in a tent near the crest, going over
the details of one of these accounts that he had torn out of a paper and
kept folded up in his purse. It was from some upstate village,--and the
house servants of the mistress had aided in the attack upon her. What
would he have done if he had been near? Usually he portrayed himself as
the rescuer, nobly driving off the wicked assailants. But infrequent
gusts of emotion colored his fancies differently: he saw himself
successively in the role of each of the participants. He particularly
dwelt upon the woman's part. If he were only a girl now,--His body
warmed at vague visions of surrender.
He was a clean boy, in the main, bodily and mentally. His mother had
impressed purity upon him, as a thing to be always striven for; and he
had implicitly followed her, as far as he was able. This conversation
with Mary was connected, although he did not know it, with an incident
that had happened at Jackson on one of his earlier visits there, when
Aunt Lotta, Jimmy's mother, had found him under the porch hammock with
Lil--two babies beginning to scorch their untaught fingers at the bigger
fires of life.
There had been no punishment for this. Aunt Lotta had merely told the
children that only common boys and girls were naughty. This had been
enough.
Several years afterwards, when the cousins had visited the
mountain,--Pelham was hardly ten at the time,--his mind had been
somewhat disturbed by the loose talk of the bragging East Highlands
boys. He had discussed it with Lil on the comfortable pampas grass above
the chert quarry not far from the cottage.
"You know, Lil, all the boys and girls we know do these things.... Think
how bad I would feel, if I were with a girl, and didn't know how! If we
could find out ... together...."
"I suppose it would be all right, Pell."
That, however, was all that had come of it.
Now he had reached his last year at the high school. His marks had been
good, particularly in mathematics and English Literature. It had long
been assumed that he was to go to college, and fit himself to assist his
father's business in civil or mining engineering. He wanted to go to the
state university, but Paul's larger plans included a northern education;
after much balancing of catalogue advantages, Sheffield Scientific
School, at Yale, was decided upon.
Most of this summer too was spent at the grandparents' place; but he
came home early, to help his mother get his things ready for the longer
separation.
The last night, before his departure, when Mary came in for the
customary kiss, they conversed restrainedly at first. Soon she was
crying, and he was sobbing as if his throat would break.
"Mother's little boy! I don't know who I will turn to, when you're so
far away."
"It won't be for long, mother. And I'll write all the time."
He went to sleep finally, his head pillowed upon her breast, as when he
had been her baby, her only son.
She could not go to the station to see him off,--there was so much to be
done on the mountain; but he held her tightly against him for a long,
long hug and kiss, and walked bravely away.
He sat down on the big stone by the dummy gap-gate. A racking tendency
to cry tore at his throat. He was a man, going out into the world of
men. He beat the rock with clenched hands.
He was not bidding good-by to his mother, and the mountain. He shut them
from him when he went to sleep each night; in the morning they were his
again. This was only a longer separation. He was going north not to
leave them, but to make himself a better son of his mother, a better son
of the mountain. He would return, and then,--
One of his youthful magic rites came to him. Standing on his toes,
facing the mountain,--stretching to his full height, with head thrown
back and hands spread above his head, he posed, a taut, slim figure,
poised beneath climbing tree-trunks of gray, and the leafy clouds above
them. For a long moment the world stood still for him. This was his
farewell and his benediction.
He slung his raincoat over his shoulder, adjusted the tennis racket and
shiny suit-case in his left hand, and passed through the gate.