"Oh, so-so. She seems intelligent."
"Men never do like Jeanne," she assured him, with a complacent rippling
gesture of her flounced body. "She's a dear, but too dreadfully serious.
Doesn't like dancing, and all----" waving vaguely in the direction of
the club.
"Tell me something about her."
"There isn't much. Jeanne--I love the French twist, don't you?--Jeanne's
a queer, dear girl, Pelham; always busy with labor committees, or
something as uplifting and tiresome."
"I've never heard of her, except from you. Is she kin to the Andersons?"
"Oh, no; her people are northern. She was living with an aunt in
Philadelphia; tired of her, and skipped out. Another of her modern
notions.... She's intelligent; but, then, brains don't marry,--they go
to Congress. Or is it the other way? Anyhow, Lyman says that I have no
brains." She smiled provocatively.
This time he came, in answer to her pouting, unworded bidding. He was
heartily glad, as apparently eager arms gave her the desired harborage,
that the other girl was by now blocks away.
A day or two later he telephoned, and on Friday evening came by the
Anderson house at eight.
"I'll be down in a minute," she called from the top of the balustrade.
The Andersons were away for the month, he recalled. With a pleasant
restlessness, he prowled around the cosy living-room, and finally
selected a library book on the table. It was by a favorite author; but
the title, "A Modern Utopia," was new to him. He was into the second
chapter when she appeared.
"What a remarkable Wells book!"
She smiled at the enthusiasm. "You don't mind walking, do you?... It's
stuffy inside."
"No indeed. Just a moment." He jotted a memorandum of the volume on a
handy envelope back.
For all the quiet grace of her face, he noticed that Jane fitted into
his stride naturally--and he was a good walker. Instinctively they
turned up the hill; the height beyond reached out an irresistible
invitation.
Her face drew his eyes as inevitably as the mountain drew their feet.
The face had sparkled on the Meade porch; but the brisk fingering of the
night breeze woke it to a positive radiance. When she turned her eyes
upon him, their radiant lashes enclosed darker heavens than those above,
framing two stars brighter than Vega.
"Tell me about yourself," he urged. "Dorothy said you had 'run away'
from your aunt----"
"Sounds like a naughty little girl, doesn't it? It wasn't quite that
bad, though."
"Think of running away to Adamsville!"
"It is an 'H' of a place----" She looked quizzically at him; his smile
reassured her. "I believe in that kind of hell. But it's nothing,
compared to what I left." Her lips closed decidedly.
He would not drop the subject. "Your aunt was a doctor, wasn't she? And
a politician?"
"So you are determined to slice to the skeleton. Yes, she's a doctor,
runs her own hospital, and as much of the rest of the city as she can.
She had the running habit, Mr. Judson; and, the first few years I was
with her, she ran me too ... and then ran me away." Unwilling lips
locked, as if unhappy at the recollection.
"Just why?"
The words were picked carefully. "She wanted me to live as her
echo--parrot her likes and dislikes, accept every limping bias as final
truth. My mother was the same type." He fancied that the eyes shone more
lustrously; but they were turned away. This topic, of the conflict
between the girl and her parents, stirred him to a disquieting
curiosity, avid for all the details, the hows and the whys; as if the
answers held some clew that he sought for.
She answered the question that he refrained from asking. "Yes, she's
alive; I left her, to go and live with Auntie. The thing sounds
unbelievable, and ridiculous; but she wanted to keep me forever at the
age of thirteen and a half. Father was dead, and she looked young; a
grown daughter was something to explain away. Why, she would have kept
me in knee skirts if the neighbors hadn't talked.... When she married
again, I left."
"Are those the only times you ran away?" he smiled the query.
She pointed to the red scowl in the north, where some startled furnace
had opened its giant eye beneath the cloudy mirror of the heavens.
"Isn't it marvelous!... Did I ever run away before? I believe when I was
four I got tired of home--we were living in Indiana then--packed my rag
doll and the puppy into my baby-carriage, and started out.... They
caught me before I had gone a block."
He watched the vacant sky. The red glare had abruptly died. "You should
see the view from our crest--Crenshaw Hill.... I almost ran away, once.
I got as far as the railroad station." He detailed the weeks of
punishment that had preceded his attempted escape.
"Your father must be a brute!" The contagious sympathy that shook her
tones moved him.
"He's really nice.... His viewpoint is old-fashioned."
"Old fashioned! It's paleolithic. No wonder you ran away."
"He figured that I was his son--accent on the 'his.' He has the idea
still."
She stared moodily at the dark blankness of the mountain, then swung
beside him on a slender coping at the head of a little park lost in a
bend of the highland boulevard.
"That's the trouble with the whole family system," she reflected slowly.
"Parents never realize that children grow up. Why not go to the other
extreme, and assume that the child has an individuality from the start?"
"You like children?" Something in his thoughtful tone threw a shadow of
embarrassment over both, intimate and strangely agreeable.
"Yes.... Very much."
The talk strayed gently to less personal matters. The moon-glow from a
street lamp drizzling through gray-green leaves fell upon her shoulder;
the smooth meeting, at the nape of her neck, between shining chestnut
hair and glowing flesh caught and held his attention; he wanted to lean
over and kiss it--harshly--as he would have kissed Dorothy. What would
this girl do? What would she say? She did not dislike him, evidently;
and he found her not only holding a deeper, more restful physical charm
than the other woman, but also possessed of a mental kinship that he met
for the first time in the other sex. Why, at times her impressions
seemed even maturer than his own. How could his thoughts dare to link
inch-deep Dorothy and this girl together!... But a kiss? No, he had done
enough of casual loving; he would keep Jane's body inviolate even from
the touch of his lips, until they were ready for the final mating....
Why not, if she would have him? What pitiful things, beside her, had
been pert-tongued Virginia, Nellie Tolliver, and the rest! A madonna in
face, a woman worthy of all life's adorations.... How astonishing was
life, that had flung them together, when he might have missed this
dearest hour that he had yet known!
Jane's thoughts, too, were busier than her words. He was attractive, she
had at once decided, when measured beside the superficial trousered
creatures, "positively not grasshoppers," that smirked their way through
Adamsville society; but he was young, very young, in his ideas--his
brain still swimming in the haze of third-hand opinions which his father
had inherited from slave-wealthy forbears. Men cherished easy mental
ruts grooved by the unprogressive centuries; pioneering paths were only
for the few. Pelham Judson looked hopeful; no more. Yet there was a
distinguishing, cordial charm in his courtesy; it was not all
lip-service. Poor kid! With a father like Paul Judson, and a mother
swathed in old prejudices like a Memphian mummy in binding
cerements--how could he be expected even to see beyond his fortuitous
rut? The brief age of miracles had passed. But he was a nice boy; and
with a different mother.... Perhaps she could do a little mothering
herself; but she must be careful not to let him take her too seriously;
or take her at all, she smiled to herself. She had boasted to Dorothy
that her husband must be progressive, or pliable; Pelham seemed neither.
And yet he would not make such a bad appearance. Clean looking,
athletic, and the son of a Judson--he would not have to be explained
away or apologized for. It would be a positive charity to keep him out
of the clutches of the usual Adamsville girl, her brain a fricassee of
bridge scores and dancing dates. She smiled lazily as she reflected that
he would take to mothering; his curly hair begged to be smoothed and
tousled. Well, she would give it a yank or two; it would serve Dorothy
right.
While their words skimmed jerkily above the subjects in which they were
really interested, and their thoughts weighed, appraised, and at times
depreciated, more deeply, an even more underlying, more ancient set of
forces were at work. Eyes talk a language that thoughts would deny;
certain proximities bind closer than the unthinking iron to the
insensate magnet; above and below speech and meditation, unseen selves
meet, measure, and mate, dragging tardy consciousness into situations
it thinks are of its planning. These calls and greetings date back of
life's long blundering on the harsh land, back to the life-cradling sea:
they speak with the unconscious weight of slow millenniums of mindless
love. They are kin to the cord that binds the falling apple to the
earth, the earth to the sun, the sun to the far starry outposts of the
visible universe, and it to the invisible majesty beyond. The infinite
pull of material attraction does not sleep: nor do these forces tire of
their ancient tasks. Love, rooted deep in life, and born of older ties,
does not cease its endless search, its tenacious intangible clasp of
what it needs to round its unique need into a blent ecstasy.
There are those who deny romance to a love kin to gravitation and issue
of insect matings. They are this far right, that romance is a late
by-blow of the ageless creative hunger.
Pelham took Jane back conscientiously shortly after eleven. They had not
mentioned the mining situation. The silent hours after their parting
were full of the subtle working of those hidden forces whose power they
had begun to feel, there upon the narrow coping above the little park.
X
The next morning, Pelham put in a requisition at the library for the
book he had commenced. Within the week he received it.
It was thrilling reading--setting at war, in each chapter, his keen
mind, which approved at once of its unanswerable insight, and his
emotions and prejudices, which balked and struggled against the
shattering, one by one, of their ancient idols. It was slow reading: he
would finish a chapter, the greater part of him ready to scoff at its
conclusions, which must be based upon sophistries; and then, to detect
the latent fallacies, he would go over it at once, and find that the
rereading merely riveted the intellectual effect the first perusal had
produced.
And yet his emotions did not lag far behind his mental acceptance. He
saw again, and more clearly, that he had come to a parting of the paths
in his thinking and being; the past months had inevitably brought him to
this. What did other people think of these matters, if they knew of them
at all? What would his father think? Again and again he told himself
that Paul must accept these obvious, scintillating conclusions from
undeniable premises; but a deeper voice, which yielded a sterner
satisfaction, reminded that the economic upset--the socialism--expounded
here was in direct opposition to all that his father incarnated. The
chasm that had split him from Paul was no new thing; it bedded in
childhood antipathies, in petty, intangible causes, in dislike at the
elder's uneven rigor of discipline, in a deep-seated resistance against
being molded to fit the father's pattern, rather than according to his
own leanings.
If his father would come with him, well and good; if not, the son at
least would be intellectually honest, and right!
There was no doubt in his mind but that Mary, the essence of motherly
understanding, would go with him in these new ways.
He finished the rereading with a sense of physical exhaustion, as if the
inner conflicts had shaken his bodily balance. With this was a false
sense that these must have always been his thoughts--the things that had
seeded and sprouted just below his consciousness. How could he have
overlooked them so long? The obvious explanation, that they had not been
there, did not occur; and he would have denied it, if it had been called
to his attention.
A night's tossing wakefulness induced a different mood. The
spirit-tiring reading became unreal and inconclusive; he had strayed off
after a marsh-light dancing over the morbid swamps of his emotional
imagination. Further reading would purge this from his system.
The librarian obligingly pointed out the rest of the scanty shelf-end of
socialist books. Ah, these would correct his wandering! There were
Engel's "Origin of the Family," a treatise by Bax that he could not
unravel, a rebound "Communist Manifesto," Blatchford's "Merrie England,"
the first volume of "Capital," in the Swan Sonnenschein edition.
Eliminating the Bax book, he began to go conscientiously through the
others; the task opened into a joyful journey. The persuasive structure
that Wells had erected found buttresses and foundations. There was no
longer room for carping or delay--he was convinced; more than that, he
was stirred by an inner storm, he heard an evangelical trumpeting such
as must have overwhelmed Saul in the blinding reproach along the road to
Damascus, he acknowledged a lashing command to spend himself for the
splendid achievement of this immense dream, nay, this reality that was
even now inevitably growing and strengthening throughout the whole
man-sown planet.
He sent in an order for these books, and many others referred to. His
mind was in a glorified glamor of dynamic thinking.
Was it possible that people could still be unaware of these vast truths?
In college he had had two courses in classical economy; but the subjects
had left his mind more bewildered than before. Now a vast searchlight
cut apart the darkness; the hazy night was as definite as day.
He tried to simplify to himself what he had learned.
Wealth--all wealth--was the product of labor. That, and nothing else.
Rent, interest, profit--labor, human labor, produced them. It was not
the land, or money, or factories; it was the toilers, sweating at their
tasks, who made all of these, and who received for their toil a miserly
fragment. Land, left idle, produced nothing; even natural products were
worthless until man's fathering work gave them value. Money--gold calved
no golden offspring, bills spawned no further bills as interest.
Factories and machines produced nothing, until man's sweat and blood
were poured out over them. Labor was the producer of everything; in
justice, all should belong to labor.
War itself, modern, "civilized" war, was a poison exuded by world-greedy
capitalism. The withheld product of labor could not be obtained by the
needy toilers, nor consumed by the overfed masters; thus backward
foreign markets were a necessity, to get rid of the product the system
confiscated and prohibited at home. Out of this grew clashing
imperialisms, and wars ... like this present one.
And here was a vast body of men--he reread Jack London's "Revolution" to
get the marvelous figures again--throughout every country in the world,
with a future planned upon unchangeable, irresistible economic laws,
striving everywhere to bring about economic justice and permanent peace.
And he had stayed out of it so long!
Slaves had gone, and serfs had gone, but the wage-slaves, the slaves of
the machines, these remained. They must be their own Lincoln, and free
themselves; their own Christ, redeeming their posterity.... Kings had
gone; money kings must go.
He had called himself a Democrat: by God, he would be a real one!
Some intuition sent him again to "The Food of the Gods"; after rereading
it, the inner excitement drove him out of restricting walls to the
ampler stretches of the night.... This, then, the flash came, was the
key to Wells' cryptic symbolism! The food of Hercules--the
Heraklaphorbia--this was an intellectual food, an idea, that raised men
to a height eight times higher than their fellows. He felt his own head
in the clouds. He had tasted of the food; he felt a sense of bodily
elation, as he pondered in the starry silence of the crest, high above
the sleeping city--a sensation of physical magnificence, as if his body
towered already above his father's, his mother's, the miners'.
The world of men was asleep, sodden, dead to the splendor of the truth
that shone brilliantly throughout it. He felt kin to the stars, the
night, the vast mountain that sustained him. The full force of the
newspaper verse that he had clipped some days before, and carried
around with him, held his mind; he had grown into its mood. The lines
obtruded themselves in fragmentary fashion:
Like calls to like; the high stars sing for me,
The harsh rude breezes speak to me alone;
I hear the voices of the hill and sea;
I talk with them, in language all our own.
Over the fields of heaven the stars are sown,
Vast shining ones, who fling their melody
To those whose ears can catch the brave clear tone.
Like calls to like; the high stars sing for me.
Stirred by the whirling stars, wild-tongued and free,
The winds out of the far-sky realms are blown,
Chanting their boisterous rebel litany;
The harsh rude breezes speak to me alone....
And then toward the end,
Flesh of their flesh am I, bone of their bone,
Blood-brother to them all eternally.
All things are one with me, and we are grown
One in our speech, our sadness, our high glee....
This was the boisterous rebel speech, this the message that they had
been trying so long to tell him. This was the answer to his soul-hunger
for an answer to life's unresting questionings.
Men, women, children--the iron city, the world--staggered blindly on,
pulled here and there by vast laws which they did not guess. There was
enough and to spare for all; there was plenty, plenty, only for the
taking, for all of the children of men. There could be, if men would but
have it, God's kingdom upon earth.... He felt a strange sense of
reverence. Life was sweet to him, it had given him the answer to these
things.
The following Friday--it was the fourth time he had seen Jane, and the
third evening with her--he tacked the talk around to this theme that had
so grown upon him in these brief iconoclastic days. The drowsy throb of
his motor left the mountain far behind; shot over the creaking wooden
bridge that unbarred Shadow Creek, traversed the graveyard glimmer of
the moon-mottled sandstone above Shadow Mountain, and now purred and
loitered through a further farm-broken valley, nosing toward the East,
where the stars rose.
"You know, Jane, I finished that Wells book ... the one I saw first on
your table."
"You liked it?" He could feel a smile in the quiet query.