Part 2 (1/2)

”The thing's here before my eyes!”

”Adamsville won't really touch the mountain for ten years. It's good ...

fine residence property, but.... That's the Crenshaw land, just beyond.

They have four eighties; they run all the way to this road.” The heads bent over the map again.

”We've simply got to take it all,” Paul reiterated.

Guild's familiar cautions and objections came forth again. ”Not that I wouldn't like to, but....”

”That's all you can see in it, then?” Paul asked finally.

”Frankly, it's all I can put in anything now.”

”I'm going into it hard. How will this do? We'll take half of this eighty together, and the nearest Crenshaw one. I'll buy the rest of this and the Crenshaw land, and the Logan place on the south.... I can raise it somehow. Pratt will help me.... It will be first mortgage.”

With this settled, they circled down to the gap, and back by dummy to the Great Southern Hotel.

On the way down to the dummy station, Paul picked a dogwood blossom. It was still fresh in his lapel when he and his son arrived at the pillared home in Jackson.

Pelham's flowers of the morning had withered; his moist clenched fingers had reluctantly abandoned most of them on the seat of the tardy Dixie Flier. But the limp remains in his grimy handkerchief he carried into his mother's room, and left on her dresser.

The boy was asleep when she found them. After pausing above a half-emptied scuttle, she arranged them in a small green vase, and replaced them in the bedroom. All night their quiet odor upset the ordered room with a word of wilder life.

III

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 att.i.tude, 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 s.h.i.+fting 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 una.s.sisted.

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.