Читать книгу Mountain - Clement Wood - Страница 9

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Paul Judson came back from that trip on fire with the mountain. On the creased blue-print he traced for Mary the outlines of the sections and quarter-sections, wooing her interest, a thing he had long ceased to do. His pencil shaded the curving paths to the crest, and aimlessly roughed in a design for a house; this he eyed from several angles. "Guild agrees that this would be the best location for a home."

Her mind pieced out the half-uttered wish. "Not for us, Paul!"

"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.

With a start, "On the cherry table, dear."

A contented mumble reached her; evidently the mislaid coverings had been found.

She stirred herself, and called the girls, Eleanor and Sue. "Will you bring father the pile of pictures on my dresser, children?"

They skipped quietly up the stairs.

In a few moments they chattered back through the dining-room, where Mary was adjusting the linen into a cedar chest. Sue stumbled over a corner of the carpet; several unframed photographs slipped out of her arms. Her father looked up impatiently. She recovered them in a moment, and spread them on the bare table.

"Mother, this is me, isn't it? 'N' this is Pelham, 'n' the baby picture is Hollis—isn't it, mother? Nell says it's Pell too."

"That's Hollis, children. Hurry: your father is waiting; he's ready to pack them."

The girls reluctantly went on, arguing over the identity of a befrizzed, balloon-sleeved aunt.

She heard her eldest son in the kitchen now, asking Aunt Sarah if she too were going to the new home. Sarah had been her mammy, and had taken care of all four of the children.

The rich black voice laughed hugely at the question. "Is I gwine? Is Aunt Sarah gwine? Is you gwine! Better ask yer maw if she gwineter take you. Whar Mis' Mary Barbour goes, I goes!"

Pelham persisted, "But Aunt Jane isn't goin'."

Precise Sue took him up at once. "Of course she isn't. Aunt Jane's very, very old, Pell. She's 'mos' a hunderd. Aren't you, Aunt Jane?"

The aged cook snorted contemptuously. "What I is, I is, Miss Susie. I'se gwine ter yer Uncle Derrell's, I is."

The children gazed open-eyed. "Are you goin' to cook for him 'n' Aunt Eloise?" asked Pelham.

"Sho' I is, honey! Dey gotter have mah cookin', Mister Derrell he says."

The noise of the creaking wagons drawn up at the side door claimed the children's attention. They ran out to watch the first loading, hoping to be allowed to help.

Paul followed briskly, thoroughly at home as an executive, issuing his orders with precision. His active mind ranged even at this absorbing moment. Well, he was leaving a slate wiped clean! All of the Jackson investments had turned out finely; he has sold the real estate to advantage, so as to cover a large part of the mountain purchase money. The street railway stock he was still carrying; its regular income furnished a safe fund to fall back upon.

After the last load had been urged away, he walked with Mary through the echoing emptiness.

"We've been happy here, Paul," she observed quietly.

"Mm ... yes. Did that box of books in the spare room go with the last load?"

He hurried up to make sure.

Mary saw the children into their heavy wraps—it was unusually chilly for a Jackson October—and young Ike drove them down to the Great Southern station in the old carriage. It had been sold to Shanley's Livery Stable—it would hardly be the thing in Adamsville; but the wife had had her way for once more, due to Paul's expansive satisfaction at the smooth-running plans, and they were to make their last trip as citizens of Jackson in the accustomed conveyance.

When they became settled in the train, Pelham retold to the sisters the story of his trip to the mountain. They had never seen it, and his colorful narrative fascinated. Mary listened attentively, adding an occasional touch.

Paul went forward into the smoking car. The Dixie Flier was a political exchange for the state, just before the legislature met. There was always some one to listen, though usually unconvinced, to his insistence on the future prosperity of this dormant section. Mary heard his nervous, energetic laugh sound out, when the train stopped at some crossroads station to pick up a giggling group of ginghamed farm-girls and stooped country elders.

The children were quiet now. Across the aisle the baby lay with his head in Nell's lap; Sue was stretched out on the seat facing them, flushed cheek pillowed on cindery hand, brown eyes closed. Pell sat beside his mother, his dreamy face pressed against the smudged car pane, watching the flickering landscape sway by.

They were beautiful ... her children. But the cost to her ambitions had been heavy. Her vague dreams of a career, cherished while she was at art school, had been shoved far into the future. She realized, with a sigh, that she could never overtake them. Perhaps some one of the children,—perhaps the little son at her side,—would show the same talent; in him she might realize her own hid longings.

It hurt her to leave the quiet home town she had always known and loved, for the restless, youthful city, big with the future. It was the second time that she had felt wholly uprooted from her former life. Home days with Paul and his urging aggressiveness were vastly different from the placid, considerate atmosphere of the old Barbour plantation. There, a sharp word had been unknown. Her kindly, courtly father, the sweet quiet mother, the gay-hearted brothers and sisters,—there was an unbridgeable chasm between these and the push of her married life.

And now again a change....

Paul had a grasp of things, a will to shove his way over all obstacles, a single-ideaed vision of a high goal, that, she believed, could not fail to win for him the success that he sought. She sometimes wondered if the gentler bringing-up that had been hers would not have been better for the children. But that could not happen. They, she, were to be a part of the swell, the hurried, assertive course of Adamsville. She was glad she would be there to guard her little ones: they would need all she could do.

A long whistle woke her from her reverie. She looked out; the dusk had softened the countryside until it was a dull blur, shot with irregular streaky lights.

Her husband shouldered briskly back from the smoking car. "This is Hazelton, Mary," he said eagerly. "Adamsville next!"