Part 4

When his father became busied with planning the subdivision of the mountain lands, to throw them upon the market, the imitative boy divided Crenshaw Hill into "Coaldale the Second." He borrowed, without permission, enough deeds and mortgages from the real-estate office to run his city for a year, and acted as seller, probate judge, and clearing gang. The streets, two feet wide, were carefully walled from the lots by the loose outcrop stones. There was a hotel, a court house, a furnace, and multiplying homes and stores.

Finally the sisters and brother lost interest, since only Pelham could untangle the intricacies of the allotments. It was all cleared away three years later by a real clearing gang, although this part of the hill continued to be called Coaldale Second.

The mountain was a lonely place for children, after all. Even though Lane braved the temporary isolation, and the girls occasionally had spend-the-day parties at the cottage, it was usually deserted except for Pelham and his imaginary companions.

He learned all of its moods. There was the plentiful springtime, when it blossomed a flood of unexpected beauty. Rich summer brought blackberries, dewberries, and hills rioting with azalea and jasmine. Autumn furnished muscadines by the creek beds, hydrangeas, and the sudden glory of changing leaves. Winter was a black-boughed multiplication of the hilly vistas.

The boys lived in dog-tents several summers. Old Peter built them a tree house in a big oak near a fallen wild cherry tree; when they slept here, the floor rocked and swung all night; they were like sailors buoyed upon a sea of restless leaves. Thus the nights revealed the mountain as personally and intimately as the days.

This close contact with it had another effect. It cut Pelham off effectually from the city boys, and forced him to a high degree of self-reliance, both as to body and mind. The wiry legs toughened, the arms grew long and able to swing him from bough to bough of the big trees, the shoulders spread strongly apart. His surplus energy was transmuted into an adaptable, powerful body.

Greater than this was the other effect. He felt safe, with the mountain as ally; not even his father could touch him, in its secret haunts. An unconscious sense of self-completeness, a rooted belief in his own and every person's liberty, became an integer of his faith.

Thus he grew away from all other people, except his mother. To her he was drawn closer, particularly when her relationship with Paul grew strained. This had been especially obvious after the birth of Ned, the fifth baby; the father had had sharp words with Mary about it.

"It was all right for Mother Barbour to have six; people had more children then. Two of them died, anyhow. It's different now."

"But, Paul,----" The calloused injustice of it silenced her.

He watched her averted face. "I see Mamie Charlton's getting divorced. Jack got tired of her and her eternal children. I saw her the other day.... She's getting old. Too many children responsible for it."

She flinched dumbly before his brutality.

He spoke savagely, through clenched teeth. "It's your fault. You ought to be more careful."

Her womanhood rose in rebellion. "Any time you're tired of me, Paul,----"

"It's easy to talk." He laughed abruptly. "And since the business is doing so well, there are always younger women,----"

He did not finish--her look silenced him.

With no woman to confide in, Mary turned to her son, rather than to the girls. His whole horizon was filled with love for her mellow brown-eyed beauty, and for the mothering mountain that came to stand for her in his fancies.

On the walks with his father, Paul's mind was filled with thoughts of the planned development of the land for residential purposes, while Pelham was busied with fantasies of fairies and knightly escapades. Father and son were continually jarring over little things; the estrangement widened.

"I think we'll continue the gap road as an avenue to the railroad tracks. Logan Avenue, we'll call it. Mr. Guild thinks that would be a good place."

"Down Dwarfland?"

The father was plainly irritated. "'Dwarfland' ... what poppycock! Why can't you get your head down to business, Pelham?"

He would meekly smother his wandering imagination, and listen to long monologues about grading, restricted allotments, and similar boring topics.

The father's sympathy went no further than to approve, in the boy, the things which the man himself liked. His son should naturally take to those things which the father cared for. Fishing trips to Pensacola or beyond Ship Island, which Pelham enjoyed more for the novelty of scenes and faces than for the tedious sport, called forth Paul's gusty admiration when the boy succeeded in holding to a game mackerel, or in a skillful handling of spade fish or mullet. The boy's undistinguished prowess in swimming and tennis, his fumbling success with a shotgun after bull-bats or meadow larks, were magnified in the father's eyes.

The pleasures that Pelham devised for himself were scoffed at. The imaginative reliving of knightly days or frontier activities was as distasteful to Paul's matter-of-fact mind as the embroidering at Grandmother Barbour's. The boy's collecting craze found no response in the parent; when the haphazard interest in tobacco tags, street-car transfers and marbles gave way to a real absorption in stamps, that consumed the son's spare money and time voraciously, Paul issued a ukase on the subject. "Get rid of them. Collect money, as I do, if you want to collect anything."

Pelham rehashed his arguments. "They teach you geography, and history...."

"They're trash; cancelled stamps, worth nothing."

"People pay lots for some stamps."

"You've got something else to think about. Sell 'em, or give 'em away; get rid of 'em. You understand?"

Pelham finally sold them to a local barber, from whom he had bought many of the unused South American specimens. "Sure, I buy 'em," Mr. Lang smiled. He went through the scanty pages, repeating all his stock jokes: "You're a guy, and a pair of guys," as Uruguay and Paraguay were reached, being his favorite. "They're not worth much to me. Tell you what, I give you thirty-two dollars."

The boy had to be content with this.

Less than a year later, he surreptitiously bought back the collection for forty, keeping them concealed in a corner of the attic.

The third summer brought weekly target practice upon the mountain. This grew out of a lynching at nearby Coaldale, following a brutal assault upon a white miner's wife by a negro. The Judson arsenal contained three rifles, several shot guns, and half a dozen revolvers; they were all put into use in the hollow behind Crenshaw Hill. The girls of course took part, and Mary, a good shot, thereafter carried her pistol in her handbag whenever she went to the foot of the hill. An exaggerated account of this spread among the negroes; only the boldest vagrant would think a second time of daring the unerring gunfire of the Judsons.

This constant reminder of the danger to women, from men, drove the boy's mind to consider this problem. Pelham had matured slowly; his mother had been his chief sweetheart, as long as he could remember. But the association with girls at the new Highlands High School made the matter more personal to him. With eager avidity he took to whatever reading he could find upon the subject. There were pages in his presentation Bible, and in an old "Lives of the Popes," that were creased and yellowed from his frequent reading.

Occasional newspaper stories moved him strangely. He lay awake almost all of one night, on the canvas cot in a tent near the crest, going over the details of one of these accounts that he had torn out of a paper and kept folded up in his purse. It was from some upstate village,--and the house servants of the mistress had aided in the attack upon her. What would he have done if he had been near? Usually he portrayed himself as the rescuer, nobly driving off the wicked assailants. But infrequent gusts of emotion colored his fancies differently: he saw himself successively in the role of each of the participants. He particularly dwelt upon the woman's part. If he were only a girl now,--His body warmed at vague visions of surrender.

He was a clean boy, in the main, bodily and mentally. His mother had impressed purity upon him, as a thing to be always striven for; and he had implicitly followed her, as far as he was able. This conversation with Mary was connected, although he did not know it, with an incident that had happened at Jackson on one of his earlier visits there, when Aunt Lotta, Jimmy's mother, had found him under the porch hammock with Lil--two babies beginning to scorch their untaught fingers at the bigger fires of life.

There had been no punishment for this. Aunt Lotta had merely told the children that only common boys and girls were naughty. This had been enough.

Several years afterwards, when the cousins had visited the mountain,--Pelham was hardly ten at the time,--his mind had been somewhat disturbed by the loose talk of the bragging East Highlands boys. He had discussed it with Lil on the comfortable pampas grass above the chert quarry not far from the cottage.

"You know, Lil, all the boys and girls we know do these things.... Think how bad I would feel, if I were with a girl, and didn't know how! If we could find out ... together...."

"I suppose it would be all right, Pell."

That, however, was all that had come of it.

Now he had reached his last year at the high school. His marks had been good, particularly in mathematics and English Literature. It had long been assumed that he was to go to college, and fit himself to assist his father's business in civil or mining engineering. He wanted to go to the state university, but Paul's larger plans included a northern education; after much balancing of catalogue advantages, Sheffield Scientific School, at Yale, was decided upon.

Most of this summer too was spent at the grandparents' place; but he came home early, to help his mother get his things ready for the longer separation.

The last night, before his departure, when Mary came in for the customary kiss, they conversed restrainedly at first. Soon she was crying, and he was sobbing as if his throat would break.

"Mother's little boy! I don't know who I will turn to, when you're so far away."

"It won't be for long, mother. And I'll write all the time."

He went to sleep finally, his head pillowed upon her breast, as when he had been her baby, her only son.

She could not go to the station to see him off,--there was so much to be done on the mountain; but he held her tightly against him for a long, long hug and kiss, and walked bravely away.

He sat down on the big stone by the dummy gap-gate. A racking tendency to cry tore at his throat. He was a man, going out into the world of men. He beat the rock with clenched hands.

He was not bidding good-by to his mother, and the mountain. He shut them from him when he went to sleep each night; in the morning they were his again. This was only a longer separation. He was going north not to leave them, but to make himself a better son of his mother, a better son of the mountain. He would return, and then,--

One of his youthful magic rites came to him. Standing on his toes, facing the mountain,--stretching to his full height, with head thrown back and hands spread above his head, he posed, a taut, slim figure, poised beneath climbing tree-trunks of gray, and the leafy clouds above them. For a long moment the world stood still for him. This was his farewell and his benediction.

He slung his raincoat over his shoulder, adjusted the tennis racket and shiny suit-case in his left hand, and passed through the gate.

VI

The temporary heroic mood, that had marked his departure from the mountain, wilted on the long railroad journey. He was very lonely at first, in New Haven. The town was dead and deserted, as he took the entrance exams. In the interval of uncertain waiting, he brought out his disused stamp album, and spent solitary evenings rearranging every stamp in the book.

With the next week, he began to feel at home. Every train vomited a riot of eager boys,--recent alumni back for the opening fun, self-conscious upper classmen, timid beginners like himself. The excitement of making new friends, and learning the immemorial lore of Yale, pulled him out of his shell of seclusion. He became one of the crowd, an atom swirling through unaccustomed channels of a fresh social body.

He grew at once into Sheff's boisterous feeling of superiority over the placid, plugging Academic grinds. He snorted when compulsory chapel was mentioned. Why, he would be a junior next year, when these staid classical freshmen would be mere sophomores. That was what Sheff did to a fellow!

His letters home were full of imposing details, gathered at second hand. There was no place like this in the world!

The first big night came,--the night of the Sheff Rush. Pelham felt a peculiar interest in it. He was not very athletic, although in wrestling, as in cross-country work, he was above the average. And this occasion was sacred to the wrestlers.

His wrestling pictures, dating from Adamsville days, had been properly admired by his room-mate, Neil Morton, a strapping, likable Texan, who had prepped at Hill. Pelham, a mere graduate of a city high school, could not expect to be ranked with the products of Lawrenceville, Taft, Hill and St. Paul's.

After the heavy-weights and middles had been annexed by the juniors, there was a lull. No freshman light-weight could be located.

Neil rose to his feet. His yearling bellow rang over the heads of the crowd. "Judson! Try Judson, here!"

Another group was singing out, "Claxton! Claxton! We want Claxton!"

Others near him joined Morton's cry. "Judson! Pell Judson!"

Claxton did not materialize.

The new crew captain squatted under the nearest torch, and peered at the group. "Judson there?"

Pelham, protesting and nervously laughing, was shoved forward, stripped by the big Y'd team men, and edged into his corner. He found himself facing Ted Schang, of last year's wrestling squad, one of the promising light-weights of the University.

The derisive juniors gobbled their war cry. "Go it, Teddy boy! At 'im! Eat up the dam' frosh!"

Teddy ate him up, the first fall, by a swift half Nelson, and a quicker recovery when Pelham tried to turn over and wriggle out.

"Yea 'Twelve! Kill 'im!"

In the brief rest, he ground his fingers into his palms, and determined to show what 'Thirteen could do. He was the crest of the class wave for the moment; an aching loyalty shook him.

This time he was more cautious. The team sub was confident now, and left a careless opening, which Pelham seized at once. After a long, tough tussle he won; but this left him winded; so that the third fall, and the match, went to the upper classman. But he had won one fall; and he was a figure in his class from that night.

His mother was inordinately proud of the boy's participation. Her elaboration of his night-letter home, which she wrote to her sister, fell later into his hands, and he shook delightedly over it. "Think of the honor, Lotta! Selected from all of Yale to represent his school on the opening week, and landing the second fall in the whole University! We are surely proud that God has given us such a strong, manly son. Paul is very pleased, and is sending him a check for fifty. Jackson can show those Yankees something yet."

Paul's pride showed in more definite and characteristic fashion. He had a story run in the _Times-Dispatch_, and the _Evening Register_; Pelham's picture headed the account, which stressed the fact that he was a product of the local high school, "the son of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Judson, of Hillcrest Cottage, and a grandson of Judge Thomas F. Judson, the distinguished jurist of Jackson." All these things advertised the family, and the business.

Neil Morton was frankly critical. "Do they do that sort of thing in Adamsville often, sonny? Why didn't your old man run his own cut too, and a picture of home sweet home, with the Judson family grouped around a lawn-mower in the front yard? Pass her over!"

But Pelham shame-facedly held on to it; and both clippings were later pasted into his scrap-book.

At the end of a hard year, Pelham, fully three inches taller, counted the days before he got home to his mother and the mountain.

He enjoyed the mountain as never before, in the summer following. At New Haven, his had been the subordinate lot of the hundreds like himself. Only unusual qualities could hold the top there; and he, younger than most in his class, was far from the envied heights. Once these younger sons scattered to their home cities and villages, their importance grew amazingly. Adamsville held young Judson to be in a fair way of becoming the biggest man in the northern university.

His home became an appendix to the Country Club, as the festive center of the younger crowd. The tennis courts were never out of use; sport frocks and flannel trousers peopled them from eleven till dusk fell. Along the bridle paths leading to the road and beyond, the leaves were set dancing by laughing couples; benches and rustic seats beneath flowering rhododendrons, beside the winding lanes of the Forty Acres, invited languorous love-making. And after a brisk session of men's doubles, the pool which Hollis had urged and finally constructed, below the chilly chalybeate spring behind the cottage, was better than all the club showers in the world.

Both of the sisters were popular. Nell danced well, and never lacked eager escorts. Sue, on the contrary, had no outstanding good feature. Her brown hair was somewhat sandy, her nose turned up a trifle, and she was not as quick-witted as the other Judsons. But the girls realized she was safe; there was no fear she would annex any of their suitors, and she shared the confidences of at least half a dozen best friends at all times.

Early in the summer, Pelham was paired with one of these intimates, Virginia Moore. The girl was tall and slim, almost gawky. Her habit was to serve a direct overhand ball, then permit her partner to win the point. Her caustic tongue made her generally disliked; but he found this an alluring novelty, after the insipid small talk of the others.

When the set was over, he led her to his chosen rock seat carved out of the outcrop beyond the gap. The talk became personal, Virginia shrewdly deferring to his superior masculinity, with flattering attention.

At last his stumbling tongue blurted out, "V-virginia, do you want to wear my frat pin?"

She hesitated, and smiled encouragingly.

He blushed under his heavy tan. "We can only give it to mother, or sister, or--or--or the girl we ... we're engaged to."

"Well, we're not related." She twisted a spray of hydrangea into her hair.

He unpinned the black enameled symbol, his heart jumping violently, and moved closer. With a pretty gesture, she indicated where he should place it.

The cool fragrance of her made him giddy. One loose strand of hair brushed against his forehead, causing him to tingle and tickle all over.... He wanted to bruise her against his body, as on mad moonlit nights he had flung himself around some rough-barked oak on the summit. Ignorant that girls, not in books, at times felt such emotions, he affixed the pin with impersonal decorum. Then he slid to the ground beside her feet, and stared against the burning sunset.

When the sun dropped back of his hill, he rose gropingly. It was hard to phrase some things; he was desperately anxious not to appear ridiculous in her eyes. Yet, unless all of his reading was wrong, something more was expected of a man in love.

"I--I ought to kiss you, if we're engaged."

She closed her eyes, docilely.

He held her lithe cool body, and he felt the rapture of brushing his lips against her own.

He led the way down the path, exaggeratedly attentive.

For the remainder of the brief summer he spent every spare moment with the girl,--mornings on the courts, long afternoon walks, whispering evenings in the rock seat. He would come home after a day with her, and lie, tumbling sleeplessly on his bed, living over the delicious last moments spent with her, and elaborating intenser fantasies of love-making. Her eyes obsessed him; they were like his mother's.

Another friendship marked the summer. Old Nathaniel Guild did not come to the place as often as before; the winter had been hard on him, and the steep paths were often too much for his frail strength. As Paul was kept close to his desk, it was the son who accompanied Guild on his infrequent rambles over the grounds, and the rougher land beyond the fence.

"You notice the tilt of these outcrop rocks, Pelham?" he asked, one afternoon. "They slant forty degrees on this hill, and forty-four beyond Logan Avenue, on the other hill. Last week I was over beyond West Adamsville; all of these strata are there; only they angle to the west, instead of to the east, as here. Like this."

He diagrammed roughly on a sheet in his note book.

"Here are the two Ida veins,--the big veins here; here is the soft hematite under them, and a thin harder vein. Then comes bedrock, and under it a heavy clay deposit. Above the Ida vein there was quartz,--the same quartz we take from the back of the place. Now, on the west part of town,"--he indicated with sweep of his hand the hazy distance beyond the furnaced city,--"there the same strata were once. But the erosion has gone further. There is only a trace of the quartz, and the three top veins. Only a few thin streaks of the bottom hard ore are there. Even the bedrock has been washed off some of the hills...."

Pelham nodded.

"If we could have gotten hold of that iron too!... All gone, all washed away."

"How does it happen that the strata are the same?"

Nathaniel looked at him sharply from under bushy gray eyebrows. He turned again to the paper, and continued the two lines until they met, high above what was now Adamsville.

"Wait.... This point is the sand hills,--there to the east. There are more of them beyond the West Highlands range. See,----" and a firm stroke of the pencil continued their lines until they arched above the former peak.

Pelham watched the moving pencil, fascinated.

"Was the mountain ever like that?"

"The rocks are absolute proof. This valley,"--he gestured toward the city,--"was once the hidden center of the hill."

"... How long ago?"

Nathaniel chuckled gently. "Ah, that's beyond us. Hundreds of thousands of years, maybe."

Somehow this made the mountain more real to Pelham. Though he might climb, under the midnight stars, to the highest crag on Crenshaw Hill, he was just at the beginning of what had once been the peak. He fancied he could trace its towering crown, blacker than the surrounding blackness, lifting up to the sky and the sparkling stars.

What a fleeting second of time, to the mountain, were the eighteen laborious years that meant so much to him! This hill would continue to jut toward the clouds when the last trace of man's restless activity had crumbled into dusty forgetfulness.

He formed the habit of circling up to these crags, after a night at the club or the park with Virginia. They supplied the needed solitude for his crammed fancies. Some nights, after he had been with her, his body would burn like a torch. The pelting passion that shivered throughout him frightened him. He needed the mountain and the stars to calm him for bed. Love was becoming an overmastering torrent; it threatened to upset his whole equilibrium.

His father got wind of the affair, through some chance comment. He went straight to the point with the boy. "You're seeing a lot of that Moore girl, Pelham."

"Yes, sir.... I like her."