Part 43 (1/2)
The husband beckoned the nearest hackman, a darky patriarch venerable as his grizzle-flanked steed. ”The Ocean House, please.”
Jane settled into Pelham's crescenting arm.
”We're here,” he added fatuously. ”Isn't it----”
”Glorious!”
They stared ahead together, to the sandy beach and the sun-glitter of the water.
XXII
Pascagoula and the gulf towns boast themselves, quite properly, as warm weather resorts. Jane, coming from a northern city, had never quite understood how Southerners could go further south for the summer; but the immediate sight of this resort in winter convinced her. Pascagoula in December was kin to Coney Island in March--a background built of flimsy, emptied by the chill; a tenantless sh.e.l.l, whose pleasure-seekers hibernated elsewhere, to more substantial shelter. It had its own incongruous charm for lovers, who never mourn at isolation.
There was a thoughtful delight in tempting the shaky remnants of wharves, broken and scattered by the whip-lash of the last equinoctial storms, and as yet not rebuilt. They visited by launch the breakwater islands, Horn Island with its fis.h.i.+ng colony, Deer Island's populous turtle farms, and the lighthouses and dismantled fort upon the sandy spit called s.h.i.+p Island. Here they walked a beach littered with curled conchs, horseshoe crab sh.e.l.ls, and debris from the deeper waters washed up for a gla.s.sy-eyed view at the hitherto unseen sun.
By electric line they touched at Beauvoir for an afternoon--Beauvoir, as surely of the Old South as the decaying mansions at Jackson; a great-pillared white house back in a grove of giant leafless oaks. Its ample s.p.a.ces and huge hand-hewn beams belonged less to the faded Confederate soldiers and their wives tenanting it than to its memories of Jefferson Davis, that pa.s.sionate advocate of slavery, whose name is enshrined beside the warrior leaders of the buried cause.
”We can enjoy the firm beauty of the place--it is so alien, so remote,”
Jane meditated, as, her arm upon his shoulder, she turned Pelham for a last view at the mausoleum of gray hopes. ”Like the Punic war; or the time-blotted conquests of the Incas, before the Spaniards came.”
”Yes; their cause, with their time, has grown unreal. Slavery is almost prehistoric, with the modern battles upon us. Old Grandfather Judson knew Jeff Davis, and visited here.... Thank G.o.d the South didn't win!”
”Slavery would have died its natural death anyway.”
”But union was worth while.... Isn't it, dearest?”
She pressed his arm appreciatively.
They spent the rest of the week in New Orleans. During these days his untried fantasies changed to reality, with the gradual knowledge of this lithe, lovely girl beside him, who had, by some freak of good fortune, given herself to him ... taken him for her mate. It was hard to avoid the rut of old phrasings of the ever-new relations.h.i.+p.
Out of the thick turmoil of the French Market and the gaudy fittings of the Hotel Iberville they found their way to the river, and wandered up its leisurely levee. The ancient lure of the sea spoke in the rank smell of drying nets and decaying barnacles on the tide-abandoned piles, of redolent fis.h.i.+ng catboats and tarry roping. She curled behind him on a solitary bale of cotton awaiting belated s.h.i.+pment, staring out at the muddy water, and the tangled masts and rigging up and down stream.
”How would you like to sail the seven seas?” she asked idly. ”Down this river, over the gulf and the Caribbean, and then out across the unroaded way of the world's ocean?” Watching him dust his feather-gray ash on a splintery beam, she s.h.i.+elded a lighted match to give new life to the moist brown ma.s.s packed within the bowl.
”With you along?”
”That would be yours to say. You must remain free, as I am; if love lasts, yes; if not----”
”And that very freedom, that modern marriage includes, adds preciousness to love; the danger of losing forges a stronger bond.”
”Thus freedom involves a slavery greater, because voluntary. Where my heart is, I am content to serve,” she smiled.
But something within her doubted how deep this shrining of freedom went.
She had noticed, at last night's opera, an attractive girl in another box bow to her husband with provoking familiarity. ”Louise Richard, a friend of Lane Cullom's,” he had explained; ”I met her in Adamsville.”
But ... her husband! If any woman presumed to get free with him, modernism would be flung aside for primitive emotions. Mating bred possession.... He was such a lover! She smiled a perverse thanksgiving that he was--a little--coa.r.s.e. Love must be planted in the earth, to grow toward the stars.
Pelham's thought drove down a not dissimilar channel. Of course Jane was ent.i.tled to hold to her idea of freedom; there was little chance of her ever wanting to make it more than an idea. But let a man dare sneak into her affections, and there would be an immediate casualty list, which would not include a descendant of the Judsons. He was amused at the bloodthirsty throwback; nevertheless, he would do something.... His thought recurred to the sight of Louise Richard, between the acts at the theater; how incomparably superior Jane was! And yet.... Freedom in love had its compensations.... Louise had said something about revisiting Adamsville.... At once he put the half-formed fancy out of his mind; Jane was enough, now and henceforth.
He returned, at a tangent, to the former subject. ”Just as you are free to remain skeptical about socialism, while I am of it.”