Clement Wood

“ A scattering rattle of applause shook parts of the crowd.
Paul moistened his lips, and explained: "The questioner asks, will not labor's prosperity come when profit has been abolished, and coöperation substituted. There is something to be said for that as an air-spun theory. It has never worked in practice. We—all of us—must feed on our daily bread, not on economic theories," he finished with crisp decisiveness.
There was a generous hand at this.
Pelham's quiet words to Jane whistled between clenched teeth. "All untrue, all unfair. A thing cannot be good in theory and bad in practice. ”

“ Are we to have it written down forever in the annals of Adamsville that a black man comes into our courts, and does not get justice? Will you make Ed Cole swing because of the color which his Creator imposed on him? Will you gentlemen be connivers at the legal lynching of an innocent man? Will your decision be that a white scoundrel can attempt to murder a negro, and that the negro must die for a man's first duty, self-protection? ”

“ This had once been the mountain's sunset slope. Flanking the central heights to east and west the sandstone hills, "Shadow Mountain," and "Sand Mountain" beyond West Adamsville, were at once younger and older than the central ridges,—later in their depositing, earlier in their contact with the sky.
A mountain has no memory, as men have. Outside forces may gash and groove it, as memory is cut into the mountain's wandering sons; but these scars have no meaning to the hill itself: they are only legible to its more meditative children. ”

“ Each of those tiny houses held situations, problems, as complex as that storm that must soon break over the cottage beyond the mining section. They were all asleep, gathering strength for fresh outbreaks of hatred and love.
What if they never woke? What if the sleep became a merciful finality, sponging out the aimless unrest men called life? Who could say which would be better?
For him, his problems simplified, glorified now by what Jane had said to-night, life, with all its zest and joyous restlessness, was infinitely preferable. ”

“ A futile game, for the poor pawns ... where one in a thousand became king; and kingship brought no joy, but only division and unrest. The blasted, furnace-punished ore was material for the painful alchemy that made it gold: more than this, the miners themselves, the stooped laborers, the slatternly starved wives, the thin children, the corpses lifted from the ruptured bowels of the hill, to a final scattering in some cheap pine house of decay—all these were part of the horrid modern alchemy that made them gold for his father's sake. ”

“ Rent, interest, profit—labor, human labor, produced them. It was not the land, or money, or factories; it was the toilers, sweating at their tasks, who made all of these, and who received for their toil a miserly fragment. Land, left idle, produced nothing; even natural products were worthless until man's fathering work gave them value. Money—gold calved no golden offspring, bills spawned no further bills as interest. Factories and machines produced nothing, until man's sweat and blood were poured out over them. Labor was the producer of everything; in justice, all should belong to labor. ”

“ The bland porter navigated down the car aisles, bundling steamer blankets, which radiated inward the body's waves of heat.
"The old life dead, the glad new one born," her husband mused aloud. "Except a man become as a little child again——For it is a heaven we plan."
"A democracy, not a kingdom, dear?"
"Never a kingdom, unless with a queen equally powered; and no subjects. The old subserviences are dying; with us they are dead. A real equality of mating; the slave-woman attitude gone forever, as we are laboring on the mountain to end the slave-man attitude." ”

“ Pelham fumbled away the afternoon at his desk, self-disgusted and dispirited. The country was being sucked into the red whirlpool of war—a self-inflicted wounding of the white race amounting almost to race suicide. Labor everywhere had fought, before the conflict, to prevent its coming; but it was inherent in the spread of world-wide capitalism. Prussian militarism was a hateful contributing factor; but, if the Germans had been merely imperialists like the British, the conflict would have come just the same: labor's dumb impotence prevented the one saving force from effective prevention. ”

“ Jane put her arms under the shoulders of a broken old negress—mother or wife—clinging to one still body on a blanket-covered packing case, and handed her tenderly to another of the girls. He caught one full glance at the woman's face, ravaged with a life's hard unhappiness, printed now with this vaster dumb suffering. The sharp clear brilliance of Southern sunshine drove in parallel golden bars from a western window. Outside, the gay blue of early summer, the beauty and joy; within, this man-made house of death. ”

“ Bunting draped the thoroughfares, the national emblem interwoven with the flags of France, England, Belgium, Russia, Japan, thickest over the court house and jail, the big retail houses, the offices of the mining and furnace companies, and the rambling cotton mills. Here the gay cloth framed the faces of women and children, busily bending, in the half gloom, above vast black machines—noisily weaving, in the human silence, cloth for more bunting. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As Pelham turned on his lamps for the homeward run, he saw that the great summer triangle had swung from the east to the sunset horizon; Vega's white beauty, dragging near the western hills, was smudged by the unsleeping breath of those squat furnaces and coke ovens, whose pauseless task was to transmute the riven ore into iron sows and pigs—the first step in the alchemy that transformed the skeleton of the mountain into a restless trickle of gold, urging itself into the overfull vaults of his father. Paul slept now, as the son would soon sleep ”

“ Just as flowers blossom and die, just as the leaves stretch out their green leaves and then grow bare under winter skies, grow old, and die, while their place is taken by the younger saplings—it is all natural, and beautiful. We wouldn't want an endless day, or an eternal spring; there must come night and winter, that the new blossoming may follow."
"It is a lovely idea," Aunt Lotta said brokenly. "It will comfort mother."
Then he and Jane turned north again, to take up the unfinished labors at Adamsville—the hazard of losing the strike, and the delight of building their home together. ”

“ There were growls of dissent from some quarters—even Pelham, sick at heart, hissed one of his statements; but the applause overwhelmed the disagreement. Benignant John Pooley, seated at the speaker's right, led the handclapping at every pause.
"It's up to you," Paul's tones sharpened, grew crisper. "You have it in your power to go on record against it, or for it. If against it, you assure a continuation of the present helpful and hopeful laws—not perfect, by any means, but laws which will be constantly bettered by an intelligent legislature, representative of the whole people. ”

“ He traced Nathaniel Guild's idea of the mighty sky-piercing ridge that had once united the iron strata of this crest and the West Adamsville one, with an overlap of sandstone whose grayed relics still crumbled in the small hills flanking the two iron ranges.
"It shrivels our puny importance, doesn't it, dear, to think of the former majesty of these hills!"
"We're as important to ourselves, Pelham." ”

“ 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. ”

“ The keen black eyes took in something of this, as it shadowed momentarily the lined, tortured face of the wife of Paul Judson. Mary Judson had grown old, older than the soft gray of her hair and the gray prints around her mouth indicated: old with the timeless age of torn illusions and murdered dreams: old with the age that the same three years had brought to Stella Cole. ”

“ Under all our veneer and varnish of culture, business, politics, we are man and woman ... male and female ... our souls as nakedly desirous as were the first two who mated.... Loved one!" It rendered him inarticulate, this delicious stirring up of the hidden deeps. It was for this, he was sure, that men and women had been molded; in this surrender they yielded themselves to the ageless currents of joy-bringing unity that created life, and continued it as life itself. ”

“ Pelham covered five county meetings and two city ones during the same time. Monday night, while the opposing forces rested their public activities, occurred the Judson finale, at Main Park, in the rickety summer band-stand. The trampled green in the open heart of the city was black with intent and serious faces, whose throats cheered themselves hoarse over the hoarsened voice of their leader,—though his tones, roughened by night after night of straining open-air talking, could barely reach half of his crowd. ”

“ An old negro, his sleep-wrinkled, shiny coat and paint-stained overalls itchy from stubble acquired in a deserted barn, idled down the switching track that ran behind the Judson lands. His scrubby gray beard was stained with blackberries; his knees were gritty and dank from kneeling beside the brook that slipped over the quartz ledges beside Billygoat Hill. In doubtful cogitation he knocked cinder and chert clusters down the steep fills, swinging his hickory stick with an air of ancient mastery.
"Lawd bless me, look at dem long houses!" as he passed the lower end of Hewintown. ”

“ The infinite pull of material attraction does not sleep: nor do these forces tire of their ancient tasks. Love, rooted deep in life, and born of older ties, does not cease its endless search, its tenacious intangible clasp of what it needs to round its unique need into a blent ecstasy.
There are those who deny romance to a love kin to gravitation and issue of insect matings. They are this far right, that romance is a late by-blow of the ageless creative hunger.
Pelham took Jane back conscientiously shortly after eleven. They had not mentioned the mining situation. ”

“ But the Tollivers were too close to permit his saying more.
Nursing his unsettling sense of guilt, until he was sure his face must publish the amorous errancy, he took himself to Jane on the accustomed Friday evening. She had not marked his absences, accepting the explanation that the report had kept him busied. To his wonderment, she was as dear and essentially desirable as ever; her range of attractiveness lay in ways so remote from Louise's red and feverish charm, that he sensed no conflict between them; he could love both wholly for their differing appeals. ”

“ She appreciated the diversion; soon he was deep in the rich memories of easy Jackson days.
Her mind twisted over other matters at the same time. Marriage meant so little to a man, compared to what it meant to a woman! Pelham, she believed, was chaste; he had told her so. There was no way of knowing. But love accomplished changed woman irrevocably. It seemed unfair. She re-breathed a silent prayer that she would not find him coarse ... even a little. It had been disillusioned Dorothy who had warned her that all men were.... Not her man. ”

“ January 17th, 1917—Adamsville celebrated its semi-centennial! Fifty years since the first farm-shack had been built on the farm beside Ross's Creek: ten years of sleepy and indeterminate farm growth, with a forty year waking that had made it the third largest city in the oldest quarter of the country! Fifty years between old Thaddeus Ross's unhitching his single horse to begin plowing, and the creation of the billion-dollar Gulf Iron and Steel Corporation, with his great-grandson Sam Ross as president, and Judge Florence and Paul Judson on the board. ”