"You live here?"
"I'm not a clubman. Life's too busy."
"Sounds imposing. What do you do, besides dance and use those serious
eyes?"
"That's all my regular vocation. At off times I play tennis, wave my
hair in the breeze, and inspect mines."
"It's nice hair." She regarded it thoughtfully.
"You can pull it."
With amused tolerance she smoothed it, then yanked it suddenly.
"Ouch! I treasure that."
An egotistic restlessness urged him. He thought once or twice of Jane,
as he monopolized this girl. By an emotional vagary he connected the
other with the clipped and forbidden rigors of the mountain life, which
he had divorced finally.
"How about dinner at the club to-morrow night, and the dance afterwards?
Or a ride?"
"But I'm to go out to the James', at Meadow Valley. Are you going?"
"Ethel James'?... I haven't been asked."
"Would they include you? Could I suggest it? It's an informal affair.
It'll break up early."
"I think it will be all right. She's here to-night.... We could have
dinner first."
He found an infrequent sparkle in her conversation, a pretty froth of
talk that pleased. But it was not for this that he sought her out. The
urge to wander that the mountain had sown in his blood impelled him most
of all. He felt his imagination inflamed by the stimulus of her
presence, the vivid challenge of her eyes, the audacious invitation of
her lips. He had met no woman hitherto who so invited love-making. She
seemed a rounded vessel brimfull of soft airs and caressing modulations
of speech, that promised more than the bare words warranted.
On the return from the James' country home, they shot ahead of the other
cars, purring in poised flight down the smooth macadam of the county
road. He turned off into the upward slope above Hazelton that led to the
mountain; he regarded himself as its privileged showman. In front of the
drowsy trimness of farm houses they pulsed, until at last he stopped the
engine where the road rounded over a steep outcrop dropping a jagged
hundred feet to the steep tree-y declivity below.
"There's a bench. It's a wonderful view," he said, his speech
thickened--the old timidity at the moment when passion possessed him
again struggling against his desire.
She took the seat he indicated. The cool whip of the breeze sprayed him
with the faint suggestion of _lilas_ that hung about her person. He
tried to pull his senses from her overwhelming fascination.
"Isn't it wonderful?"
She nodded, lips apart, eyes starry. Discarding his shield of
constraint, he turned swiftly on her, catching the filmy fabric covering
her arms and bringing her face toward him.
Her voice was level, conventional. "You mustn't." She tried to squirm
away.
"Yes!" He whispered his urgent triumph.
His lips avid from long self-denial, he blent with the wild sweetness of
hers. She remained quiescent a moment, then sought to free herself. He
clung to her, as if his life depended on retaining the warm rapture of
her kiss. She thought he would never end.
At last she pulled away, a trifle dazed with the force of his passion.
His lips fell lower, kissing her shoulder, her arm, the hand squeezing
the taut ball of her handkerchief. As she took even this from him, he
fell to his knees beside her, pressing long kisses on the handkerchief,
any symbol to satisfy the aching hunger of his body.
She watched him in wonder. Her hand faltered out and pressed back the
damp hair from his forehead. "You poor boy! You poor, starved boy!"
The paroxysm over, he sat at her feet, moodily watching the lower
reaches of the valley. He realized the breach of faith with Jane; but
there was a perverse part of him that rejoiced at the duplicity. The
other love was chaste, beside this; after all, he could love more than
one woman.... Should he stop with one wrenched rose, when the bush was
on fire with red beauty?
Again he sat beside her. "You know, Louise," he urged tentatively,
enough withdrawn from the scene to study her reaction to his conduct,
"I've been straight with women.... You are the only girl I have kissed
in a year."
It trembled on her tongue to say that he had made up for lost time; no,
that would sound too flippant. "I know, I know," her answer rang rich
with soft understanding.
It was the next night that she reverted to the matter, the fluent
voluptuousness of her body still tingling from the harsh tenderness of
his arms. "You're a funny boy.... What you said last night...."
"I said so much!"
Her thought could not be laughed away. "About your keeping straight, you
know.... I have a friend--she only married last Mardi Gras--who always
insisted she wanted a man who had had experience.... Girls have queer
notions, haven't they?"
"I should think the girl would feel soiled ... that way. I should hate
to have my mind filled, on my wedding night, comparing the wonderful
girl I had won ... with ... other women I had had."
The perverse infidelity shook him again. "And yet I kiss." He turned the
word into fact.
"There's no logic in it," he persisted, his body eased with the
lip-contact. "Kissing shouldn't be wasted, any more than the rest. It's
only a prelude to the more wonderful finale...."
"I enjoy the prelude," she temporized, in lazy content.
"And afterwards----" he breathed on his hand pausing fearfully on the
tantalizing silken softness of her cool ankle, then straying with
restrained gusto toward the edge of the lacy fabric above.
"No," she smiled. He solaced an obedient spirit with the touch of the
denying lips.
The next afternoon he never forgot. They started early for Shadow
Mountain, promising the Tollivers to return with mountain azalea, if it
was still blooming. She dismissed this as an excuse.
Over the iron bridge curving above Shadow Creek's muddy bluster they
hummed, and then up the hill. They left the car in the shade of a sandy
lane, and clambered up the steep intricacies of sandstone, to a wide
table-rock slipped from the hoary buttresses above. Beyond this were the
azaleas.
The sun-splashed slope was a dizzy riot of the rosy blossoms. A fringe
of the stocky shrubs curved over the jutting shelf of the rock, burning
with timid pink blossoms at the crest of their blooming. A few of the
individual flowers had passed maturity, and hung in the woodland wind,
perilously pendent from the long pistils. Louise, rejoicing in the soft
gray-green of her smock, lifted a big spray of the scented beauties and
nested her face in them. A brown shimmer of hair caught on a nervy
twig: Pelham undid it with unnecessary deliberation, and took pay for
his chivalry.
They turned to the flowers. Uneven ripples of color spread from the gray
rock's knees toward the blue crest horizon, a fragrant carpeting of pink
and white and every modulation down to a deep ruby. To the right a
veritable tree of speckled petals, frilled and dancing on airy feet in
the sun-drizzle. A curveting breeze blew up a spray of flowery snow,
dusting their footing. The farther blossoms seemed, by some trick of
vision, a flowery fabric clinging veil-like above the gay green beneath.
It was a restless pool of glowing color and odor.
From bush to bush they zigzagged, until her face was bowered in the
bright sprays, and his fingers weary with whittling their stems. He took
them from her, left her on the rock, and piled the flowers over the rear
seat.
As he returned, his eyes rose restfully from her blossomed opulence to
the lake of blooms. "There seem to be more here than before! They grow
faster than we pick."
She made room for him beside her. Her head found a soft pillow in his
coat; lazily she stretched her body on the natural couch of lichened
firmness.
His lips burned greedily against the soft flush of her neck. He let his
torch-like body rest half upon hers, for a long silence of tantalizing
rapture. At length, repentant at the thought of Jane, he swung to a seat
beside the other girl. In a moment he was conscious only of her, proud
with an inner satisfaction in the man's role he was sure he was playing;
more strongly than either of these feelings, afraid--afraid of himself,
afraid lest the urgent emotions writhing within him would drive control
from him, and force him into a situation which would be, no matter its
outcome, unsettling, disquieting....
Man's innate tendency to mate as freely as the vast mountain oaks,
shaking their pollen broadcast on every breath of breeze, was in him;
but this had been tamed and sublimated, by his mother's overfond
molding, by her pricking desire to keep him hers and no other woman's as
long as possible, into an ingrowing chastity, a morbidly re-fondled
rejection of sex, except for the arm's-length wooing of Jane. But the
very opulence of his flowering mountain spoke against this, urged an
abandon to the fierce ecstasies of yielding and taking. The warring
wills found a sanguine battle-ground within him. There was a throbbing
zest in tantalizing himself, by postponing the inevitable necessity of
some choice. He must think it out carefully; he could wait....
Shaking her skirts free of littering twigs, she rose. He was a puzzle.
She steadied herself by his arm. "I like it here," she summed up softly.
The wild azalea filled the glassed sunroom of the Tollivers with a faint
echo of the glory of the distant mountain.