The rain exhausted its ammunition during the night; a clear truce
followed. The bright green cleanliness of leaves, the reburnished
brilliance of golden-glow and flaming canna, showed the hill heartened
by the hours of storm.
But there was nothing morning-minded in Pelham's soul, as he irked over
the day's details at the mines. All that he had to do seemed mechanical,
inconsequential; the planning had been done already--his admirable role
was that of a cog, touching off other cogs to their diverse tasks in the
vast mechanism that was disemboweling the mountain,--the mothering
mountain, that had once been pal and parent to him. Less than a cog,
indeed--for the other cogs held him as alien; he could not share their
lives nor their thoughts, nor was he one of the final beneficiaries, no
matter what the miners might think.
He knew, too, that his father was becoming as alien to him as these
miners held that the son was to them. Pelham was wrapped up in the
minutiae of the mining; and this was a book in which Paul had covered
only the first simple chapters. Again, the son's reading at the northern
college, and the intangible outlook acquired there, opened vistas that
Paul could not share; and in those matters where the two wills came into
direct touch, such as marrying "where money was," and relationship with
women, they were pole-distant apart. The son, in his youthful
restlessness, was at outs with the whole situation; he was bored with
it, as he was with the young concerns of his brothers, the chatter of
Nell and Sue, and the immeasurable vapidity of Nellie Tolliver, Lane
Cullom, Dorothy Meade, the whole group of Adamsville's stale,
unprofitable friends, young and old. There was, of course, his
mother ... and the mountain; but she was part and parcel of Paul's
existence, too; and the mountain seemed strangely uncommunicative and
passive, these days, as if waiting for him to make the break, to take an
affirmative step needed to quicken his thinking and being.
The insipid promise of the afternoon's fete, for instance--were his days
to be an unending vista of such chatter, and trivial preening and
strutting of visionless girls and young men? Dorothy offered more than
that; yet he was singularly at odds with himself over her. To be burnt
by a fire he could not touch: to chain himself, a voluntary Tantalus,
before perilous sweets just out of reach--an admirable role! It was in
his own hands to end it; and since Paul's advice about Butler's Avenue
did not condemn the thing that he shrank from in Dorothy's case, he was
repelled by the remembrance that he had ever considered ending the
purity that Mary had held him to.
After all, his sisters' fete would be better than that.
But when he had carefully dressed for it, and was immersed in its
shallow flippancy, he reacted the other way. Lettuce sandwiches and
lemonade!--Good God! Determined to dodge the rest of it, he sidled
around to the garage, and sneaked out his car. When the fresh crest
breeze sprayed over his face, he pressed on the accelerator, and only
slowed with the turn into the road to the city.
At his arrival before the darkened Meade bungalow, two voices reached
him from Dorothy's lit boudoir. His feet scraped slowly up the steps;
after two thoughtful feints, he pushed the bell. There was distaste
already at what lay before him; life offered no new way out.
"Turn the porch switch, Pelham," Dorothy called from above. "Read the
papers.... We'll be down soon."
So she even assumed his presence!
The swinging door was pushed outward, a short while after he had
balanced himself on the extreme edge of the swinging couch. A girl
stepped out and walked over to him. He rose conventionally.
"I'm Jane Lauderdale," she said, in a voice of pleasing, bell-like
quality. "'Thea told me to amuse you, until she's ready. You are Mr.
Judson?"
As their minds clashed in preliminary conversational skirmishing, some
sense of her restful loveliness came to him. It was her eyes that spoke
most clearly--those lighted windows in the spirit's comely house. Jane's
eyes were a deep, swimming brown, with an effect of largeness and
roundness, as if she looked upon the irregular march of the hours with
the unfeigned naivete of a child--a semblance heightened by a starlike
radiance of the eyes themselves and the long shielding eyelashes. They
seemed less to stand off and inspect him, than to reach out and envelop
him, bringing him within their substance. Despite the difference of
shape, they held the same deep liquidity of his mother's eyes.
The whole face, he fancied, was that of a mother--a madonna. The live
brown hair was smoothed back from a high forehead, with the simplicity
of a Grecian maiden; there was just a hint of pallor in her complexion,
whose whisper of lack of health was negatived by glowing cheeks and
sparkling face. It was not the typically thin-visaged Italian madonna;
it was this sublimated into an ampler shapeliness of feature. The voice
was clear and direct, with the lingering overtones of a gong quietly
tapped in still dusk. Her presence was restful, comforting, and at the
same time embodied an unmistakable challenge to his own nature and
worthiness.
The impression of childish naivete, he soon found, must not be stretched
too far; her vision was astonishingly clear and comprehending, with a
definiteness that at times almost amounted to dogmatism.
Her mention of long-time friendship for "'Thea" gave something to
inquire about. "You'll be at her table Saturday evening?"
"At the club, you mean? I hardly think so," and she smiled softly.
"Don't you dance?"
"Yes.... But not often. To be quite frank, the people one meets at the
country club are rather banal ... even Dorothy's friends."
"Thank you! That's a touch. Perhaps you bridge."
"Sometimes I make a fourth; but cards are very easy to get absorbed in,
to the point of obsession, don't you think?"
"I suppose so; if you take them that seriously. Are you fond of golf, or
tennis?"
A charming precision was in her answers, as if they had been framed
before. "Tennis suits the strenuous adolescent; golf, the bay-windowed
corporation head. One is behind me; the other I pray never to become. I
don't love corporations," she smiled. The smile covered her preliminary
judgment; his questions were banal, almost gauche; but what could one
expect of a worshiper of Dorothy?
What did the girl like, anyhow? These were sure-fire topics with all the
rest Pelham knew.... Perhaps the _Post_, on the table nesting her arm.
"Are you enjoying the latest Chambers' story? I don't think it's up to
'The Danger Mark'--though, of course, Chambers'----"
"I enjoyed part of the opening--you know, the dry-goods inventory--the
lingerie part. It's informative: a Sears-Roebuck for the Broadway shops.
But--beyond that!"
"What are you interested in?" Inability to pigeon-hole her among the
feminine types he was used to called forth this poverty-stricken
directness.
"I'm interested in what you are doing, Mr. Judson, ever since 'Thea
mentioned it." Her straightforward eyes lit up for the first time.
"She's done nothing but sing your praises for the last few weeks." He
rose in fatuous gracefulness to her opening.
The frank eyes measured him coolly. "What interested me was your work.
You have charge of the mining at your father's place, haven't you?"
A bit dazed by the sudden shift, he told his connection with the
management.
Her nod of satisfaction puzzled him. "I've always wanted to learn
something of the other half of the story; I know the miners' side, from
work with the United Charities. And I've been studying reports, until a
sheer excess of wrath made me lay them aside."