Part 35 (1/2)

”I'll leave by Sat.u.r.day.”

Paul turned away. ”It will be a good thing.”

His soul stinging with the father's injustice, he waited until the other had gone in leisurely certainty down the hill, and went in to his mother. ”I'm to leave the mountain next Sat.u.r.day, mother.”

”It's necessary, Pelham. You have distressed your father in so many ways, I cannot see anything else for you to do.”

Hurt pride spoke within him. ”He said my late hours set a bad example for the boys.”

”Yes ... that too....”

The words crowded out. ”He said that I was late because I was going with bad companions, when he knows that's a lie!”

”Pelham, you shall not speak that way of your father to me.”

”Mother, you know I've been at meetings and debates; you know how straight I've been. If he'd had his way, I wouldn't have been,” he added with heated significance.

”What do you mean?” The unrehea.r.s.ed query came against her will.

”When I was visiting at the Meades, he advised me to go to Butler's Avenue, mother--to go to the Red Light district--to go to the women there. That was his fatherly advice to me!”

Her face a.s.sumed a Puritanic severity, an alien look; she masked the tumult of her heart with this outward symbol of incredulity. ”I cannot believe you, Pelham.”

This was not the first occasion in which he had detected Mary's mobile features solidified into a harsh and unreasoning insensibility to fact.

Whenever he or one of the other children had cornered the mother into a situation demanding condemnation of Paul, this self-gorgonized expression hardened upon her; it hid any admission of surprise, any criticism of the husband, for the moment. And he had observed that it served a second function--persisted in, it gave time for the breach in the confidence in Paul to heal without apparent scar; henceforth she seemed to live in the self-imposed delusion that her husband had never been at fault. She would have held as a model wife the Red Queen, who had trained herself to believe six impossible things--presumably to her royal husband's advantage--before each breakfast.

Pelham had come to despise this obvious scouting of reality, this sentimentalizing which called facts what it would have them, not what they were. He retorted rather sharply, ”There's no use not believing me.

You know I am not lying; those were my father's words.”

The smug overcast of unbelief became glacial; in serene security in her husband's impeccability, no matter what the facts might be, she turned toward the house. ”I do not wish to have you discuss the matter any further.” Then, a softer look in her eyes, she came back to where the son stood, and slipped an arm around his shoulder. ”I'm doing this for your own best interest, mother's dearest boy; just as your father has decided in his wisdom that the time has come when you must leave the cottage.”

There was a preliminary catch in her voice, affectionate, affecting, and not consciously affected. ”G.o.d only knows, my son, how much I love you....” She did not say any more, as if with a moment's clarity of insight she doubted the appropriateness of the inevitable formula. She threw a half-puzzled glance at him, that seemed rather to survey herself through him, as she left off talking, pa.s.sed up the steps, and through the screen door--for all the world as if to screen herself further from his, and perhaps her own, searching scrutiny.

Well, that was ended. Pelham prepared to move. He found a vacant room with Mrs. Hernandez, wife of a comrade. The outlook on symmetrical suburban homes, in a cheap section near the mountain's foot, was far different from the rolling vistas he had been so fond of; but at least his books and Sheff pictures reminded of the old place.

Jim Hewin, whose attentions to Diana continued, although without his first impetuous insistence, questioned the girl about the matter on one of their infrequent meetings under the dumb oaks on the crest. ”Young Judson left home?”

”Last week.”

”Squabbled with his old man?”

”I reckon so.... He just left.” She continued listlessly to stare at the burning breath of the far furnaces.

At length her moping could not be ignored. ”What's the matter, gal?

What's on your mind?” He tried lightly to shake her out of her melancholy.

She responded weakly to his clumsy friendliness, her tongue locked as to its real trouble. She had come to-night to tell him; it seemed so easy, as she went over the matter in the cleared kitchen, waiting for the supper preparations to begin. She must tell him; he was ent.i.tled to know.

And now an icy self-disgust tied her. This man at her side--what could it mean to him, but a new peg for his obscene jokes? She had gone into this thing, at the last, willingly; she must see it through. It was not for him to guess at the faint unstirring life which her mad yielding had summoned within her.

She pretended to meet his mood, and left him sure that she had ”got out of her spell.” She cried herself and her hidden secret to sleep.