THE FOG
------------------------------------------------------------------------
By William Dudley Pelley
THE GREATER GLORY
THE FOG
DRAG
------------------------------------------------------------------------
+THE FOG+
_A NOVEL_
BY
WILLIAM DUDLEY PELLEY
[Illustration]
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1925
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_Copyright, 1921_,
BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.
────
_All rights reserved_
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TO MY OWN BOY AT EIGHTEEN
“DANDELION FARM,”
PASSUMPSIC, VT.
June 23, 1921.
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CONTENTS
BOOK ONE
DRIZZLE AND MURK
CHAPTER PAGE
I THIS FRECKLED WORLD 3
II THE DRESDEN DOLL 12
III MORE PARENTS 21
IV THE FAIRY FOUNDLING 31
V IMPRESSIONS 38
VI THE ODD STICK 43
VII EXQUISITE THINGS 51
VIII PRAYER 58
IX BENDING THE TWIG 76
X THE SEX 89
XI POET IN HOMESPUN 102
XII FIRST COMPLICATIONS 120
XIII GOD AND THINGS 131
XIV CONSIDER THE WORM 141
XV VALLEY LAMPS 160
XVI MORE ROMANCING 167
XVII VALLEYS OF AVALON 187
XVIII ANOTHER CASE 203
XIX TACT AND DISCRETION 213
XX SIDETRACKED 227
------------------------------------------------------------------------
BOOK TWO
SUNSHINE GLORIOUS
CHAPTER PAGE
I TOO EASY MONEY 245
II GROPING HORRIBLY 267
III GOOD RESOLUTIONS 291
IV POOR SOW’S EAR 297
V ALWAYS JUSTIFIED 306
VI INFINITE PATIENCE 316
VII FINE FEATHERS 326
VIII DRIFTING 347
IX THE LAST STRAW 353
X FIRST LIGHT 367
XI MAN’S WORLD 391
XII UNTIL WHEN? 401
XIII INTERLUDE 410
XIV SUNSHINE GLORIOUS 419
XV THE AMETHYST MOMENT 439
XVI SYMPATHY 447
XVII ENTANGLING ALLIANCES 458
XVIII EAST IS WEST 474
XIX VIA LOHENGRIN 484
XX HILL TOPS 495
------------------------------------------------------------------------
BOOK ONE
DRIZZLE AND MURK
------------------------------------------------------------------------
+THE FOG+
CHAPTER I
THIS FRECKLED WORLD
I
I straddled, precariously balanced, atop a seven-foot fence marking the
northern boundary of the little Vermont school yard. As this was the
opening morning for the September term, I had left home painfully
dressed in the full armor of country-village scholarship. Already the
puckering-string of my blouse was broken and my new dollar-and-a-quarter
boots were hot upon my feet. No matter! Noisily on the philosophical old
boards I whacked a barrel stave. I had aspirations toward making the
lower world of pinafored humanity remark nervously of my valor and
horrible propensities for breaking an arm. But I did not address that
pinafored world directly. No such aplomb is possessed by a youngster of
eight.
A new boy edged his way into the yard twenty minutes before the bell
rang and moved along my fence. He concentrated upon tallying its
knotholes. I noted that he was a stranger and immediately took his
measure.
“’Lo!” I greeted him.
“’Lo, yourself!” he responded.
“What’s yer name?” I demanded, piqued.
“Name, name, Puddin’ Tame; ask me again and I’ll tell yer the same!”
“Aw, don’t get fresh!” I advised him. “I could ‘do’ you with one hand
tied behind me—if I wanted.”
“My ma licks me if I fight—when I’m dressed up. If it wasn’t for that,
you couldn’t.” And the new boy looked at me gladiatorially, expecting me
to believe this bravado without a question.
Incipient hostilities were halted by the appearance—or condition—of the
new boy’s face. Twenty-four years have passed since that morning. I have
beheld many boys. Yet never since a freshly molded clay Adam was
pronounced a reasonably passable job and stood against the nearest rock
to dry has one human being looked into the features of another,
regardless of age, and beheld such freckles.
I once knew a boy who had thirty-one thousand seven hundred and
eighty-four freckles, not counting those behind his ears or a few odd
thousand remaining, sprinkled across the back of his neck. The average
boy manages to worry along with eighteen or twenty thousand. But the
infinity of freckles upon that new boy’s face was beyond all
computation. The Lord might have known the number of hairs in his head,
but there He stopped. It would have been hopeless even to try to
separate those freckles so to compute them, anyhow.
“Aw, you don’t need to tell me your old name,” I condescended. “You’re
one o’ them Forges that’s moved up to Brown’s.”
“Howja guess?”
“I know by your freckles. I heard Lawyer Campbell call your folks ‘them
freckled Forges.’ Your ma’s got ’em and so’s your pa. You’ve all got
’em—like measles ’n itch.”
Instead of growing more bellicose, the new boy became apologetic.
“Yeah, but they ain’t got so many as me—Ma and Pa ain’t. Anyhow, I can’t
help it. I got a torpedoed liver.”
“You gotta _what_?”
“A torpedoed liver!”
“What’s a torpedoed liver?”
He tried to explain. In the light of a maturer understanding, I assume
he meant a torpid liver. But I was little wiser than he that morning, so
one liver was as good as another.
“Year, but they ain’t got so many as me—Ma and Pa leaves. Ma says all us
Forges has got too much iron in our blood and it makes us rust all over,
outside.”
“Iron in yer blood!” I looked at the Forge boy incredulously. Was he
spoofing me?
“Howja know?” I demanded. “Can yer hear it clank together?”
I had a mental suggestion of sundry billets and bars of cold steel,
wagon springs, old horseshoes, machine castings circulating through the
new boy’s system and wondered how he managed it.
“Naw,” he went on. “’Tain’t that kind of iron. It’s all melted or ground
up to powder or sumpin’. I ain’t never heard it make no noise, anyway.”
“Maybe we ain’t got no floatin’ iron in our family,” I defended, “but my
Aunt Lucy’s got sumpin’ just as good and horrible. She’s got floatin’
ribs, three of ’em. Betcha you ain’t got nobody in your old family with
floatin’ ribs.”
It was now the small Forge boy’s turn to show incredulity. And
momentarily I exulted.
“But ribs don’t float,” he contradicted. “They’re hitched to yer
backbone and run around yer stomach like hoops. I seen a pitcher of a
man with his skin off, once. If they was loose and floated, you’d be all
flat and hollow and sort of pushed in across your chest.”
“Is that so?” I demanded hotly. “Maybe you know my Aunt Lucy’s shape
better’n me!” This stranger asked me to believe he had iron circulating
in his system and yet doubted that mere bones could follow suit.
It was true that Aunt Lucy’s irresponsible ribs had given me much
perplexity as to just where they floated, or where they would go if they
suddenly lost their buoyancy and sank. Still, I knew my claim had a
basis in fact. I had overheard too many first-hand testimonials of her
abstruse condition from the fearfully and wonderfully unjointed lady
herself.
Before I could conjure up more human freaks, however, related to me by
facetious Nature, with a diplomacy which has always been charming, young
Nathan Forge introduced a new subject.
“We just moved to Brown’s place last month from Gilberts Mills,” he
declared. “And we got five bedrooms and a vegetable cellar and
cockroaches an’ everything. An’ I got a dog named Ned that don’t get
sick when he catches skunks. He caught seven one autumn and brung ’em to
me. But one wasn’t shook quite dead yet, and I had to stay in bed a week
while they buried my clothes. Pa wanted to bury me, too, but Ma wouldn’t
stand for it!”
“That’s nothin’,” I countered. “We gotta cat at our house named
Apron-strings ’cause she’s always behind you when you turn ’round. An’
all you gotta do to make her have kittens is _watch her_! My father
says, ‘Look twice at that dratted little beast and she has young all
over the place’ He’s goin’ to dig a special well to drown ’em in when he
gets time. He said so.”
“We got two wells over to our house already,” Nat retorted,—“one to
drink from and one to fish things out of. Campbell’s pants is down the
last one.”
“Campbell’s pants!”
“My father said so. Lawyer Campbell come over the day we moved in, to
see about the hay. He’d bought some new pants to the Center and had ’em
in a bundle. On the way home he missed ’em. When Pa heard, he says to
Ma: ‘He might look down that well in the south lot! I’ve fished
everything out of it but money!’ he says. ‘Bet I could find Campbell’s
pants if I fished long enough.’”
Evidently the Forges occupied exceptionally interesting premises. I
congratulated myself that I had been discreet about punching Nat’s jaw.
I would cultivate this new boy.
Not once during all this, however, had we looked each other straight in
the eye. That is another unethical thing between boys of eight. We went
through gyrations with hands, legs, elastic torsos. We kicked at stones
in the sand. We pried them loose and threw them. But our faces were
always averted.
“Got any brothers or sisters?” I finally demanded.
“Yeah. I gotta sister.”
“Pshaw! How old?”
“Four. But she ain’t no good—only to tag ’round and squeal to Ma when I
skip my chores.”
“Sure. I know. Girls always spoil everything. Ain’t it awful?”
“Awful’s no name for it,” agreed Nathan.
II
I learned other things of Nathan regarding his family that morning and
in the day and week ensuing.
The Forges had a cow, a grievance against the selectmen, a hard time to
get along and a mortgage. Nathan’s mother was five years older than his
father. The latter had once aspired to be a minister. A premature
marriage, however, had sent him to the humbler calling of tapping and
heeling shoes. Along with farming in a small way to help out with
domestic expenses, Johnathan Forge now proposed to cobble shoes at his
new residence in East Foxboro.
On his father’s side the boy’s ancestry was English,—that bigoted,
Quilpish English which contends that a man’s wife and children are his
personal chattels and foot-scrapers. A neurasthenic Yankee wife resented
the absurdity but was too weak-charactered to do much more than scream
about it. It puzzled me in those days to hear him orate to my father
about “every man’s house being his castle.” I could never discern
evidences of a “castle” about the flat-roofed, drab-colored, hillside
home for which Johnathan had paid the Browns five hundred dollars.
Nevertheless, he ran his castle as he pleased, and all the neighbors
could do was shrug their individual and collective shoulders and mind
their own business.
Johnathan was a short man with watery blue eyes. And his mouth never for
a moment failed to register that the world “had it in” for him. His
antidote for this mundane conspiracy was Religion. Religion completely
strangled his sense of humor—if he ever possessed a sense of humor—and
kept it strangled. As his children approached maturity, he went to and
fro in the earth and moved up and down in it with a stuffed club in his
clothes always loaded to the point of explosion, fearing that some one
was treading on his authority. He took his religion seriously, Johnathan
did, and it gave him a sickening amount of trouble.
Nathan’s mother also took life and religion seriously. There was no
other way to take it, with Johnathan for a husband. As Johnathan aged,
he became stout. As Anna Forge aged, she became thin. But as I first
recall her in those East Foxboro days, she was a fairly well-rounded
woman with terribly work-reddened hands. She too had weak
eyes,—greenish, pin-pointed eyes. Her neurasthenia and hard work
ultimately “wore the flesh all off her”, and soon she had contracted the
nervous affliction of a twitching face. She did her work in the hardest
manner possible and was always tired. She had a sallow, jaundiced
complexion and it flavored her days and nights.
Nat’s little sister Edith was hardly more than a baby. Yet even at four
years she had her father’s petulant mouth and her mother’s whine.
Nathan bore no resemblance to either parent. He was just a
freckle-faced, snub-nosed, wonder-eyed, good-natured, little country
boy. Quickly I found myself attached to him and he became my chum.
With all due respect to ninety-nine per cent. of that specific sect who
are emphatically all that the Forges were not, the latter were
Methodists. They were more. The village had it they were “shouting
Methodists.”
I knew well enough what a regular Methodist was. My own father and
mother were Methodists. But a “shoutin’ Methodist” was a novelty and a
mystery. I flew wildly from the Forge shop one Saturday morning when,
after watching Johnathan at work on a pair of child’s shoes for a time,
I summoned the nerve to ask:
“Say, Mr. Forge, tell me sumpin’, will you? I’m a brother Methodist and
all like that, you know, but not a ‘shoutin’ Methodist’, like all the
village calls you, and, well, I’d like to know what a ‘shoutin’
Methodist’ is. Would you mind shoutin’ for me a coupla times so’s I can
see how you do it—and why?”
Johnathan not only shouted for me but he threw something at me for good
measure. I believe it was the nearest old shoe. Both of which had
nothing to do with religion. I stopped running only when I had crossed
the lower village. I hid the balance of that forenoon under Artemus
Wright’s blacksmith shop, lamenting that probably I would never be
allowed to play with my chum again.
It was in 1897 that the Forges bought the Brown place. Rumors of war
filled the land. If war came, my father was going. My mother cried a lot
about it.
III
The girlish young teacher gave Nat and me opposite aisle seats in school
that autumn morning, though quickly Nathan went above me. His
grandmother had taught him to read; he was already familiar with Æsop’s
“Fables” and Grimm’s “Fairy Tales.”
Late that afternoon, Nat and I walked home together,—down the hill,
through East Foxboro village, past the Methodist and Baptist churches,
off on the Center road toward Brown’s hill. The distance was only a
mile, yet it took us three hours.
Scuffing up the dust, stopping to throw stones at trees or skipping them
across the surface of the Causeway—the great sheet of water reaching on
both sides of the road just before we started to climb Brown’s hill—day
after day during that autumn we covered that distance together.
The Causeway does not look so “great” now. Nathan and I drove over there
the other day. The place was only a depressing mud flat, rank with
stagnant water, grotesque stumps and tall rushes, where town loafers
were trying to hook discouraged hornpout.
But to make slow progress homeward—to our “chores” perhaps, but also to
fathers and mothers and faces and scenes which come now only in dreams,
scaring out chipmunks, sighting an occasional sand rabbit or woodchuck,
sensing the country air sensuous with ripened blackberry, goldenrod,
milkweed, or the roadside pines in Hadley’s pasture—for that privilege
again, dear God, Nathan and I would give of our lives many years!
For this is the first sorrow in the heart of a man, that he should have
known boyhood and never been able to appreciate its heritage until the
clocks of time are all run down and the chambers of his heart are
peopled with ghosts!
IV
In February of the year following, the _Maine_ was mined in Havana
harbor. I remember my father coming home through a storm of raw, wet
sleet and leaving his horse unharnessed while he entered the kitchen to
read the headlines of the Boston paper to my mother. In great block
letters on the front page was the grim word—“WAR!”
Neighbors came in after supper. Opinion had it that fighting would
follow at once. They conversed as though death were in the house. While
they talked, I tried to listen. I fell asleep under the sofa, and when I
awoke I was in bed with mother.
I could not understand why she hugged me to her heart so fiercely and
sobbed in the winter darkness.
Spring came quickly after that. It seems only yesterday that Nat and I
attended the “flag-raisings” and public gatherings down on the village
Common, with the boys in blue getting ready for Chickamauga. I can hear
again the martial band music; I can see the flash of the drillmaster’s
sword and hear the thumps of the rifle butts in the open door of the
town engine house where “Captain” Jack Halloway was drilling the Foxboro
boys. I watched them with throttled heart and dry, hot throat.
My father was among them!
Never shall I forget that last breakfast at home, how smart he looked in
his stiff blue uniform and how heavy his rifle felt when I tried to lift
it and point it at a target. I remember too that he and mother avoided
each other’s eyes during that breakfast. Mother did not go to the
station. She could not trust herself. I tried to see dad as the train
pulled out but the crowd engulfed me.
All my life since he has been but a picture in a plush album on the
center table in mother’s parlor—an erect little man with a fierce
mustache, his slouch hat with crossed-muskets showing plainly.
Nathan’s father did not go to war. He said war “stood condemned by
Religion.” He quit cobbling to move down to the Center and open a store.
Micah Baker’s eldest son Sela came home on a furlough the following
autumn. I remember his rumpled soldiering clothes, the rakish angle of
his hat, how he stood with his back to the kitchen range, warming
himself. He had been ill with fever and wore an overcoat, roughly tied
at the neck with a piece of rope. My mother’s face was ashen as she
waited for him to speak. As he was about to leave, he remarked quietly:
“Herb wanted I should tell you his last thoughts was of you and the boy.
And ... he didn’t suffer no more’n could be expected. He said especially
to tell the boy his dad’s sorry he can’t be on hand to help him as he
grows to manhood.”
That summer we sold the farm, mother being unable to work it with father
never coming back. We also moved down to the Center. Mother happened to
get a house near the Forges. So Nathan and I set our little feet upon
the long journey that begins in vales of opal mystery and the wondertime
of early childhood, winds pathetically through twenty years of fog while
growing boys are groping to find themselves and hew their niche and
accomplish their task, ... knows perhaps a few golden hours of life’s
philosophic, sunlit afternoon, then ends in an afterglow of still
greater mystery out behind the farthest star.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER II
THE DRESDEN DOLL
I
Caleb Gridley, the girl’s father, ran the tannery in the larger town of
Paris, twenty miles west of the Foxboros. He was a big-bodied, small
headed man, with iron fists, a paving-block jaw and legs like telephone
poles. Some of his words weigh seven to the pound and he did not secure
them from his Bible, either, if he ever read his Bible.
Mrs. Clementina Gridley, the girl’s mother, claimed she was related on
her mother’s side to a duchess. Then to double rivet the exclusive
ancestry, on her father’s side she had vague claims to a relative who
had crossed on a certain well-known occasion to this stern and
rock-bound coast, landing at Plymouth and marking the commencement of
the antique furniture business. Mrs. Gridley was short and in upper
contour resembled a barrel. She clothed herself and little daughter in
purple and fine linen, and both of them toiled not, neither did they
spin. She brought the first lorgnette to Paris, hung its first pair of
sunfast overdrapes, called old Bill Chew, the colored man-of-all-work,
the “coachman”, affected to be shocked when old Caleb blew his tea in a
saucer and tried unsuccessfully to start a local aristocracy.
These two—a mother with an ingrowing consciousness of her own grandeur
and a father who endured it because he was too engrossed in making money
to give his family much attention—were the little Gridley girl’s mental,
moral and spiritual handicaps. More than one good woman’s fingers itched
to paddle her; more than one good man would have counted it a special
dispensation from Providence if he could have spent five minutes alone
with her and thoroughly boxed her ears. But Bernie’s extremities were
never paddled and Bernie’s ears were never boxed.
At four, little Bernice was told she was made of better clay than the
ordinary run of Eve’s daughters and at six she was sure of it. At eight
she frequently mentioned the family “blood.” At ten she had queried Mrs.
Joseph Fodder if “common children were not terribly coarse and
mortifying” and “why did the Creator ever make the lower classes so
disgustingly prolific?”
Yet the little snob was pretty, pretty as a Dresden doll. And the
Duchess kept her starched and ironed and curled and furbelowed until the
tired mothers of the disgustingly prolific lower classes gave up all
competition in despair.
For the opposite and lower end of the social seesaw the Forges as a
family would have answered as well as any caste exhibit to the county.
Living in Foxboro Center was enough. Could any social good come out of
Foxboro Center? Certainly not! Mute, inglorious Miltons might infest the
place, but the Gridleys—at least, the female Gridleys—aspired to nothing
in common with mute, inglorious Miltons.
II
It was a pleasant July afternoon, after we had moved to the Center, that
the head of the House of Gridley hitched his sleek black mare to a neat
piano-box buggy and drove twenty miles eastward to call upon the House
of Forge. It was not a social call. The head of the House of Gridley
left all such nonsense to his Duchess. John Forge owed old Caleb three
lapsed payments for harness leather and old Caleb intended “to get his
money or bust hell wide open.”
When he drove forth from the Gridley gates to “bust hell wide open” that
afternoon beside him was the Dresden doll. She was ironed and starched
and curled and furbelowed—as usual—and she kept the sun from her
peach-bloom complexion by a tiny, beribboned parasol. They had not
ridden a block before old Caleb referred to this parasol. He said, “Keep
that trick umbrella away from my hat or I’ll smash it!” Old Caleb was
not at all aristocratic like his Duchess.
The Gridleys reached Foxboro Center. John Forge was at home, “getting
in” his hay. Arrived there, old Caleb descended, backed the mare around
and unhooked her check-rein. He trusted her to remain without hitching,
so long as her nose was in the clover growing outside the Forge front
fence. Thereupon Caleb went down into the fragrant hayfields in search
of Johnathan. The mare spread her front legs and began to enjoy herself.
Little Bernice-Theresa’s first maneuver was to unwind the reins from the
whip. Holding them in one hand and the foolish little parasol in the
other, she greatly hoped sundry persons would appear and remark upon
what a marvelous child was this, who could assume jurisdiction of an
untied mare while her elders were flagrantly absent.
It may be recorded that some one did appear; Nathan Forge “materialized”
beside the picket fence and the drama, old as the hills eternal, was
commenced.
Nathan Forge, living in Foxboro Center, was naturally of the earth,
earthy. He was likewise of the soil, soily, very much soiled in
comparison with the starched and beribboned daintiness of little
Bernice-Theresa. His hair needed cutting; his eyes were vague. His face
had grown a few odd-thousand additional freckles with the summer
vacation and one great toe was wrapped in a horribly unsanitary rag.
This product of the disgustingly prolific lower classes beheld the smart
rig halted before the house and was seized with an exasperating
interest.
Now every one who has been a boy, or who owns a boy, appreciates that
while sisters are, generally speaking, of no earthly consequence or
account whatsoever, there are girls and _girls_! This is better
explained by studying the behavior of such a boy in propinquity with a
feminine stranger who had first been properly starched and ironed and
curled and furbelowed, though not conventionally introduced.
The boy does not place his feet upon the surface of the world in a
methodical, orderly manner, maintaining himself in a status of physical
poise and bodily rectitude. He demonstrates the difference between girls
and _girls_ by the knots in which he proceeds to tie his spine. No boy
ties his spine into knots for his sister. So Nat made his first
concessions to The Sex by starting to wind himself in and out through
the holes where pickets were missing in his father’s fence.
I forego a record of the twistings and turnings, the writhings and
contortions, which ensued to attract the attention of the Fayre Ladye
and bind her to his chariot forever. He did not neglect to rub his
backbone on the gatepost four times, whirl about without upsetting
himself three, hit the trunk of an adjacent tree with stones twice, and
balance a stick on his nose once. Then he climbed the gate and swung
head downward in horrible danger of dashing out his brains.
“Lo!” he greeted. And he grinned.
The crass effrontery, the _lèse-majesté_, of daring to address Her Royal
Highness was bad enough. But that grin!
Bernice-Theresa Gridley sat stunned. She could conjure up no phase of
etiquette for meeting the situation but a posture of frigid silence and
staring stiffly ahead. He was less than the dust beneath her carriage
wheel. True, he wasn’t yet beneath her carriage wheel but he might land
there in a moment if he didn’t stop trying to twist himself into a human
interrogation point. Why didn’t her father come? Oh, the mortification
of it!
“Say, what’s yer name?” persisted this awful progeny of the lower
classes.
A numbing silence.
Then, though embarrassed with his daring, Nathan announced:
“That ain’t the way to drive a horse. Girls don’t know nothin’ bout
animals, anyhow. I know how to drive a horse better’n that! I’ll climb
up there and show yer!”
Bernice-Theresa jumped.
“You horrid boy!” she shrieked. “If you as much as touch one of these
buggy wheels, I’ll have my father put you in jail where the rats will
run _right over your face_!” It was the most hideous fate that
Bernice-Theresa’s nine years could conceive.
“Huh! I ain’t afraid o’ rats! We caught a big one in our trap last
night. You stay here and I’ll fetch him! You could take him home and
stuff him and trim up a room with him.”
Acting on this generous impulse, Nathan quitted the gate and ran to get
the rigor-mortis exhibit. And in the ensuing moments, confronted by the
horror of his return, little Bernice-Theresa suffered all the tortures
of the damned. A filthy, intimate boy from the disgustingly productive
lower classes had gone to bring her a rat! Dead! He would handle it. He
might even drop it in the buggy. She must fly while flying was possible.
But she could not climb down from the vehicle and fly with legs. That
would be common and crude; beside, where in the vicinity would she fly?
No, it was far more consistent for the daughter of a Duchess to fly with
a horse and buggy. Therefore, ere the unspeakable vulgarian could
return, Bernice-Theresa got into action.
She shut her parasol and separated the reins. She nearly pulled herself
from the slippery seat, straining to raise the mare’s unwilling head
from the clover. The animal’s flank was slapped sharply. When Nathan
returned to the gate, the road in front of the house was empty.
Nathan headed for the lower mowing. He approached old Caleb without
introduction.
“You gotta walk home, mister!” was his way of announcing the news. “Or
else you better chase your buggy. Yer horse has runned off with it
hitched behind him!”
Old Caleb came up through the Forge yard in four-foot jumps. He stopped
for a speechless instant at the gate.
“If you’re goin’ right home, you might tell her I didn’t mean to scare
her,” explained Nathan. “We caught this rat yesterday and I was going to
let her have it——”
“You little blatherskite! Scared her, did you? So she took the lines and
drove off home!” Caleb shook his knotty fist under John Forge’s nose.
“If my girl’s hurt, I’ll sue you for this! I’ll sue you anyhow, for the
leather.”
Thereupon old Caleb started after the rig in ludicrous hops.
Hours later he reached Paris. His paving-block jaw was still adamant but
he had discovered no traces of buggy, daughter or wreckage en route. By
a miracle Bernice-Theresa had reached home without mishap. The tragedy
was this: Finding at length that she had arrived at her destination in
safety, all parental solicitude vanished. Caleb Gridley took the progeny
of a Duchess across his knee _and spanked her_!
As a result of that spanking, his wife made his life so miserable that
he sued Johnathan Forge at law. He had to vent his spleen somewhere. And
a week later, being served with papers by the sheriff, Johnathan Forge
also had to vent his spleen somewhere and went in search of a
freckled-faced little boy.
Without explanation, simply desiring something weak on which to wreak
his temper, stifling his conscience with the argument that the boy’s
misbehavior had frightened the Dresden doll and precipitated the whole
calamity, “Brother” Forge of the local church belabored a contorting
little body with a harness tug until screams and howls brought his
mother.
Nat left his father and his mother “having it out.” He limped painfully,
still sobbing, up the road to my house. We climbed to our haymow
together and Nathan finished his weeping down beside me in the hay.
III
That was the first time Nathan and I seriously discussed The Sex,—when
the boy’s grief was spent and in its wake came philosophy.
“Gee, but she was pretty, Billy,” he confided. “She was different, too,
than girls here ’round Foxboro. I sort of felt funny in my insides when
I seen her. Mabel Turner now—she’s fat and red-faced and her clothes is
always coming apart somewheres. Mary Anderson, she’s always laughin’ and
makin’ fun of my freckles, and Alice Blake’s got freckles worse’n me,
and warts besides. But this girl—gee, Billy, she was swell. I wonder why
was it I felt so funny about her right off as soon as I seen her. I
never felt that way about no girl before. Most girls is—well, just
girls!—you know!—no good!”
“That’s love!” I declared largely.
“Love?” Nathan was awed. “Then love’s swell, ain’t it?”
“Depends how you look at it. Sometimes it is. Then again it ain’t.”
Nat pondered this. It was deep. Finally in a whisper he asked:
“Billy, why is it that girls is different from boys, and women from
men?”
“It’s on account of babies,” I expatiated. “Benny Mayo said so. A man
told him once.”
“How, on account o’ babies, Billy?”
Thereupon I recounted boyhood’s version of the intricacies of
obstetrics, as viewed by boys who are not wholly fools.
I hold no brief for myself. The parent who will not concede that mere
children do not seek light on life’s greatest mystery—where do people
come from?—and ultimately discuss it, is an ass. Only there was no
perverted mischief on my part about it. Nathan wanted to know something.
I possessed the information. It was no more than as if he had asked me
how to make a willow whistle or bait a chuck-trap.
“Gee!” exclaimed Nathan frightenedly, “suppose it’s so, Billy?”
“There’s sumpin to it,” I averred. “We’re all here, ain’t we? I’m gonna
ask my Ma.”
“So’m I,” declared my chum.
Nathan finally started homeward. That night he sought elucidation for
the mystery exactly where it was normal he should seek it,—from his
mother. But instead of supplying his need in a healthy, kindly fashion
fitted to his years, Anna Forge did a narrow, vicious thing.
She whirled on her small son with an alacrity which startled the senses
out of him. And she administered a shock to the sensitive boy whose
effects did not entirely vanish with manhood.
“Who put such ideas into your head?” she demanded hysterically.
“Nobody ‘specially, Ma. I was just thinkin’, that’s all.”
“No! Some one put the idea into your head. Who was it?”
Nathan began to cry.
“B-B-Billy and me was talkin’ about it in the haymow this afternoon.”
“So Billy did it! I shall see Billy’s mother in the morning and have him
horsewhipped for what he told you.”
Nathan began to cry harder.
“Why, Ma?” he demanded in panic.
“Because all such things are vile and dirty and filthy and horrible!
Little boys who think them don’t go to heaven and have angels love them.
They go to the Bad Place and are burned in fire forever and ever. You
know how it hurt when you burnt your finger on my flatiron yesterday?
Imagine you were burnt all over your body like that—and there was no way
to stop it and you just had to suffer terribly with never a moment to
sleep or forget. That’s what happens to bad little boys who say such
things or even think them!”
“But why is it bad, Ma? Billy didn’t mean to be bad. We just wondered,
that’s all. I can’t help thinking about ’em, can I?”
“Oh, what a wicked, wicked little boy! Your dear mother will be up in
heaven and she won’t have any little son with her. Her little son will
be down in the fires of hell—burning for always and always!”
The Forge woman pictured eternal torment so vividly that Nathan grew
hysterical. When the woman had the boy worked into such a state that he
was too terrified to stay alone in the dark because of the devils
waiting to grab him, she made him promise never to think about girls or
women or babies again. Sniveling, the little shaver promised.
His mother went to her bedroom and narrated the affair to her husband.
Johnathan was for thrashing the boy soundly at once.
“No—you’ve given him one whipping to-day and one whipping a day is
enough. I think I’ve scared him so badly that he won’t think of the
subject again. And to-morrow I shall certainly see Billy’s mother. If
she doesn’t chastise her dirty-minded young one, I shan’t let Nathan go
on playing with him.”
Grumbling, John Forge was persuaded. Next day Mrs. Forge went into
indignant session with my mother.
“Yes, Billy catechised me in the same way,” the latter responded. “I
told him what I thought it sane and reasonable to tell a lad of his
years. He’ll learn it outside, anyway. Probably he’ll get a sordid,
vulgar, perverted version. I don’t believe you can scare these things
from the minds of live-wire children, nor stifle the most normal
impulses of growing boyhood. I for one shan’t try. As my boy grows I
want him to feel that he can come to his mother at any time with his
problems, especially his girl problems, without having the immortal
daylights scared out of him or made to feel that he’s a criminal. It
ain’t natural, Anna Forge, and so it ain’t common sense.”
“My boy shall not go on playing with yours, if that’s the sort of thing
they’re talking.”
“Suit yourself, Anna Forge. I believe your philosophy’s wrong and you’ll
live to rue it.”
“I don’t have to be told what’s decent for my own young one!”
“Maybe you do and maybe you don’t. That’s yet to be proven.”
Anna Forge stalked homeward. The two women did not speak for a month.
But Nat’s mother had done a malicious thing that day. She had only
turned the barb of my friend’s curiosity inward and prodded that worst
enemy of the human race to attack her small son viciously: _Repression_.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER III
MORE PARENTS
I
Over the meadows and far away in the dreamy hush of summer days; lying
amid scented haycocks and watching the castling clouds drift away like
floating fairy isles in a sea of turquoise; listening to the church
bells of a quiet Sunday morning; hearing the clear, distant note of a
trombone across the valley from some farmhouse in the afterglow;
watching the log sleds toil up the hill past our homes into the cold,
carmine glory of winter sunsets. Boyhood’s Memory Book is an anthology
of little things—sweet, sad, haunting, all vital, ever poignant with
heart-hunger—calling us back to live in their atmosphere again, if only
for a single blessed day.
Somehow Nat and I fail to remember the ending of the Spanish war as we
recall the beginning. Occasionally we would be loitering about the
station when trains pulled in and sun-bronzed men in rumpled blue would
swing off in pairs, with blanket rolls around their bodies, thump their
rifles down in the corner of the nearest lunchroom and appear too
ravenously hungry even to flirt with the girl who presided behind the
sandwiches and wedges of leathery pie beneath glass globes.
The war did not stop. It petered out. I will not say I did not cry many
times in the night when my mother cried, because both of us missed
father. But the war was not for Nathan and me,—not for our generation to
bear. _Our_ war was coming later. We found food of some kind available
when we hungered and boys are not epicures. So long as that food was
forthcoming, and we had a place to sleep at night, wars or endings of
wars affected us not We were too occupied with things that were close to
us and close to the soil.
One afternoon in the spring of 1917, before we went to war, Nathan and I
were walking together when we came upon a crowd of deadly serious
youngsters playing in a vacant lot. One boy, tied securely, was arousing
the neighborhood with his shrieking.
“We’re playin’ he’s a German interned for perdition,” one of the lads
explained.
“_Per_dition?” exclaimed Nathan.
“Yeah! Oratin’ against the government and tryin’ to stop the war fer
them that wanner fight. Intern fer perdition, doncher understand?
Interned for perdition!”
“Kids don’t change much, Bill,” commented Nat, with a sad smile, as we
resumed our way. “Remember the day we played ‘Hang the Spy’ and almost
succeeded?”
“I remember it, Nat,” I said. “But not because it has anything to do
with the sameness of boyhood in different generations. I remember it for
what happened to you afterward—what you got for it.”
Nathan sighed. We paced a long way in silence. It was not hard to recall
the rear-tragic events of that afternoon and their aftermath.
II
We caught Nathan duly as the Castilian spy, and made him “surrender his
papers.” A court-martial passed fatal judgment upon him. He was led out
beneath one of the trees in Mrs. Fairbank’s orchard and ordered to mount
“the scaffold”, a dilapidated barrel. Around a high limb I succeeded in
tying one end of a rope. It had a slip noose at its dangling end about
eight feet from the ground. After much perspiration I got this noose
over Nathan’s head.
“There’s too much slack in it,” the condemned man suggested, anxious
that there should be no bungle in the ceremony to spoil the grandeur.
“When I’m hung, my feet’ll touch the ground and then I won’t be! You
better slip it further down, Billy—under my arms or round my waist.”
Rather than reclimb the tree and retie the rope, I conceded.
A little French boy named Beauchamp was commissioned to kick away the
barrel and “send the miserable felon to the wrath of a jealous God.” We
had somewhere heard it phrased so.
Rolland Beauchamp played his part perfectly. In fact, the whole
execution was a bit too perfect. On a frenzied run our mothers started
for that orchard when from under the biggest, highest tree began the
wildest and most horrible howling that ever disturbed the quiet of
pastoral Vermont.
The spy, on being hung, had thought better of his fate. It wasn’t a bit
of fun to be hung. Yet one could not altogether blame him. Never was a
spy hung as our spy was hung.
I had slipped the noose too far down Nathan’s body. When the barrel went
out, the upper half of his torso outweighed his legs. He was whipped
upside down in a twinkling and hung there ignominiously, kicking wildly
’twixt terra firma and the stars.
This in itself wouldn’t have been so distressing if he had not been
suspended in a slipnoose. The more he kicked and bellowed the sharper it
tightened.
“We tried to hang him!” cried the terrified little French boy.
“Tried!” wailed a wrathful mother when she beheld her offspring
suspended upside down, just out of reach.
“We could get him down with a ladder, if we only had one!” volunteered
the small Mayo boy who had been responsible for all this brilliant
business. “Mr. Simpson’s got one, a mile down the river. I tell you
what!” he suggested enthusiastically to Mrs. Forge, “you come and ask my
mother if I can hitch up our horse and I’ll go after it! I could make it
in less’n an hour an’ not half try!”
“And leave this boy to be squeezed to death? I never saw a Mayo around
Foxboro yet that wasn’t a fool!” Mrs. Forge wrung her hands. “Oh, oh,
oh! Somebody’s got to climb that tree and cut this boy down and do it
quickly, or he’ll die o’ pinched vitals! Oh! oh! oh!”
“But if he’s cut down sudden, he’ll land on his head and break his
neck,” groaned Mrs. Harper. “Why on earth should they hang him upside
down?”
Nat’s unpremeditated inversion had complicated matters. And all this
time the spy was kicking and struggling and bellowing until it was a
mystery why he wasn’t heard down in the business part of the town.
Moreover, the prospects were that if he were left there much longer, any
attempts to cut him down would be superfluous; he was coming down
himself—in halves!
But the Providence that looks after children, drunken men and fools was
proverbially kind that afternoon. It sent old Amos Winch riding past
atop a load of oats. Amos took note of a kicking, shrieking boy
suspended from an apple bough above a group of distraught women and
children and came down through that orchard in jumps. As he ran, he
unclasped a big pocketknife. Out on the limb, he wound a taut rope twice
about his mighty hand. Then he hacked and cut above it. Hand over hand
he hauled the little Forge boy up, caught him firmly by the collar and
straightened him out.
Immediately that he was down and manifestly unhurt, Mrs. Forge walked
over to a lower apple bough and pulled off a “sucker.” She stripped the
switch clean of leaves and grasped her youngster firmly by the collar.
“But Ma!—I didn’t mean to do it! Please, Ma, don’t whip me. I didn’t
mean to do it!”
“I suppose you got hung upside down like that accidentally.”
“We was only just playing ‘Hang the Spy’!”
“And scaring your good, dear mother in consequence so she’s nearly a
nervous wreck. I’m going to see you remember never to do such a thing
again.”
“Anna!” interposed my mother, “don’t be a fool!”
“You keep out of this!” snapped Mrs. Forge. “I can run my own young ones
without assistance from the neighbors.”
And there, before that distressed audience, Nathan “got it good.”
III
I have not narrated this episode especially to excoriate Anna Forge. I
mention it because—horror of horrors!—among the teams to be blocked in
the road by Amos Winch’s cart was the neat piano-box buggy and mare of
Caleb Gridley. The Duchess was out for a drive with the Dresden Doll.
Nathan knew that the princess of his dreams was beholding him “catching
it.” And the welts of that switch did not manufacture half as much pain
as the hurts which resulted to his dignity. For a boy has dignity. It is
usually a hard, honest, legitimate dignity in sharp contrast to mere
self-elation too often masquerading under that name among older people.
And that boyish dignity is a heritage. In after years it is the genesis
of that invaluable attribute, Self-respect.
IV
The hanging episode was scarcely history before Nat and I got into
another scrape, illustrating the brilliant Forge method of shaping
childhood.
The execution of martial enemies being a bit too strenuous, the fertile
little Mayo boy hit on “Slave in the Dismal Swamp.” He assured all
witnesses that it was capital sport playing “Slave in the Dismal Swamp.”
In all our town, however, there was no colored boy, let alone a small
colored boy, available as the slave to escape and be hunted. But that
did not hamper the Mayo boy’s ingenuity.
“One of us can black himself and be the slave,” he suggested.
“What with?” I demanded. “Ma won’t let us have any matches to burn cork.
Besides, we couldn’t get cork enough anyhow.”
“I know what’s good and black that we can get a lot of,” Benny Mayo
promised. “You all come with me and I’ll show you.”
He led us down behind the Mayo barn. Several old carts, hayracks and
farm implements were stored there.
“Now then, Nathan, you take off all your clothes and we’ll black you,”
Benny directed. “This ain’t goin’ to hurt you. How can it?”
“I won’t do it unless Billy will!” Nathan objected stoutly.
I submitted.
We disrobed, _au naturel_. The little Mayo boy and the others set to
work on us.
From the inside of the wagon hubs was scooped the blackest, deadliest
grease the malignity of man has ever invented. The axles of the
vehicles, especially one old dump cart, were rich with it.
Over the sunburned pelts of our little bodies the stuff was smeared in
handfuls. It smelled frightfully but we remembered how it must feel to
be a real slave, and stood it as stoically as possible.
From head to foot we were covered with the green-black “goo.” Our
handlers took especial care to rub it well into our hair and ears. When
that smearing “was called a job”, we were Africans with a vengeance. And
the odor shrieked to heaven.
“But we can’t put on our clothes with this stuff all over us!” wailed
Nat suddenly.
“Slaves in a dismal swamp don’t need no clothes,” the Mayo boy
contended. “Start off just like you are and it’ll make it harder to hunt
you.”
“But somebody might see us without any clothes and arrest us!”
“That’s why it’s goin’ to make it harder to hunt you; you’ll keep out of
sight better without clothes.”
The dismal swamp was a cat-tail bog over on the Hastings farm. Thither
by back lanes we were escorted, the “ferocious bloodhounds” being the
Mayo boy’s sky terrier, Pink, and Nat’s shepherd dog, Ned, with the
aforesaid immunity from the depredations of skunks.
Nat and I were turned loose like two justly celebrated gold-dust twins,
minus all concessions to civilization. And in the next two hours we
became relieved that there had been an Emancipation Proclamation.
As the afternoon waned, the mosquitoes were bad enough. But Nat’s little
sister, Edith, had beheld our “making-up” from afar, and about the time
we entered the Dismal Swamp, she reached our mothers and told her story.
Two highly exasperated, grim-lipped women ultimately joined the
“bloodhounds” and outdid them. For our mothers found us and the dogs did
not.
Splashed with mud and slime on top of our coating of axle grease,
scratched by brambles and bruised by limbs of dead trees which protruded
from the most unexpected places, the slaves in the dismal swamp finally
found a soft spot to sit down and weep with a great lamentation. We had
a disturbing hunch from our experience in the bog water that our
Ethiopian camouflage was not going to be removed with any such dexterity
as the Mayo boy had assured us so glibly.
The posse finally surrounded us. There was no escaping through that
cordon. Our mothers’ skirts were bedraggled.
Their shoes squeegeed water at every step. But they bagged us. And the
expression on their faces when they held us at arm’s length was
sickening. Somehow we felt that again the Mayo boy had “spoofed” us. The
Mayo boy was not among those present when we were taken into custody, by
the way.
“We’re slaves in a Dismal Swamp,” explained Nathan, when his mother had
firmly entwined her fingers around a slippery ear.
“Well, in mighty short order you’re going to be two sorrowful boys in a
darned dismal wash-dish!” prophesied that wrathful lady. And she looked
at my mother, not knowing whether to laugh or to cry.
“Anna,” gasped my horrified mother, “—suppose—suppose—it won’t wash
off!”
“Then I’ll set fire to my young one and burn it off!” avowed Mrs. Forge
grimly. Whereupon Nathan began caterwauling and his asseverations that
he didn’t mean to do it became as sounding brass and tinkling cymbals.
Through the ups and downs of thirty years I have made many strange
journeys over many rough pathways. Not one of them has equaled the
awfulness of traversing those two miles of oozy bog that summer
afternoon, dragged wrathfully by a grim woman whose concentration was
glued on the impending ordeal of separating me from that unspeakable
coating of slime and grease.
“When I catch that Mayo young one,” announced my mother, “I’ll skin him
alive!”
“Amen!” affirmed Anna Forge. She gave Nathan a yank that pulled him over
a boghole as though he were greased. Which he was. Greased thoroughly,
adequately, irrevocably.
We got as far as the Forge homestead, and my mother decided to stop
there and cleanse her offspring in company with her neighbor, rather to
lighten the labor—to say nothing of the color of her boy—by sharing it.
They tried rain water and they tried soap. They tried cold water and
they tried hot. None of it made any more impression than as if they’d
been trying to wash a duck. They tried scraping it off with a paddle, as
one scrapes butter from a slice of bread. In certain localities this
last went so far as to disclose that deep down under the mass we were
young humans of the Aryan persuasion. In our babyhood we might even have
been pink. But at present we were anything but pink. We were a sort of
blue-mauve-green.
“My God!” cried the nearly hysterical Mrs. Forge. “There’s going to be
no getting this off successfully short of boiling ’em!” Thereat, the
woman’s neurasthenia got the better of her and she wept.
“Anna, stop your blubbering! I’m going to try kerosene,” my mother
announced. “Billy may go round the rest of his life smelling like the
dirty end of a grocery store, but I’ll have the satisfaction of knowing
I ‘seen my duty and I done it.’” And she whacked a little French boy for
meddling with her washcloths.
The two women pooled all the kerosene they could find in the
neighborhood. It wasn’t the fairly cleanly product that may be purchased
in 1921. It is debatable which was rankest in taste, feeling or
smell—that yellowish coal oil or the devilish massage-muck which now ran
down our shivering bodies in streaks. Filling a tub with it, mother
started in, determined, like Grant, to fight it out along that line if
it took all summer. The prospects were that it would take all summer.
I forget in how many “waters” of oil, hot steam and soapsuds they washed
us. Somewhere around thirty-seven. There is no reason to doubt the
figure. So much concentrated washing had never happened to either of us
before. Thank God, it has never been needed since.
Nat and I were two sick boys—physically as well as spiritually—long
before those ablutions were completed. A sizable number of persons of
color, sold into servitude, have undoubtedly been lost in swamps. But
Nathan Forge and his biographer were the first in history who were
captured, dragged out and washed in thirty-seven “waters” before being
slated for additional chastisement.
Vividly I recollect little Nathan’s plaintive plea at about the
thirty-fifth “water”, when he gradually began to exhibit evidences of
Caucasian extraction.
“Ma, are you goin’ to lick me?” he demanded, gazing timorously up into
his mother’s twitching countenance. It was the fearful, pitiful
interrogatory of a naked, shivering, thoroughly chastened little boy who
had taken the word of a fellow man at its face value and discovered,
like the psalmist of old, that all men are liars.
“I’m too done up to lick you! I’m going to let your father lick you!”
his mother assured him.
“Anna Forge, are you crazy?” my mother exploded.
“No, but I’m going to see that some discretion is put in his make-up if
I have to brand it in with an iron!”
“You may brand in more than discretion, Anna.”
“I’ll take my chances!”
V
I was sobbing—mainly for Nathan’s sake—when my mother led me home. She
wrapped my red, flaccid little body in warm flannels and put me to bed.
I heard no censure for my part in the day’s foolishness. Only she said
wearily before she took out the light:
“Please, laddie, never play ‘Slave in the Dismal Swamp’ again. You see
what mother had to do, how tired she is?”
“Yes, Ma!”
“Then always remember, when a fellow does something wrong—sooner or
later—somehow or other—it’s his mother that pays the price.”
I could not see her haggard face for my tears.
She laughed,—a queer, tired, tender laugh. Then she kissed me again and
was gone. My grief was mercifully merged in slumber.
VI
It was a week before Nathan left his bed. His father threw an ax handle
at me when I went around to the rear of the Forge premises to see if
Nathan could come out to play.
I think Johnathan was a bit ashamed of himself and likewise afraid. He
took this gentle method of suggesting that the neighbors, particularly
the neighbors’ offspring, keep out of his family affairs. Because Nathan
had dropped unconscious during his subsequent chastisement and remained
unconscious all night. Next day a doctor was summoned. The doctor was
told that Nathan must have eaten something which had failed to agree
with him.
I finally figured out, in a boyish way, what was amiss in Nathan’s
relation to his parents, particularly his father.
Obedience, to Johnathan, consisted in a child instinctively knowing
beforehand the thing to which the parental mind objected and avoiding
consummation of that thing like a pestilence. Then, too, floggings and
thrashings were uniformly good for a youngster. They gave him character
and made him love and respect his dear parents when he had grown to
manhood and looked back on what an exasperating little devil he had been
and how much he had “tried” those who had done the most for him.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER IV
THE FAIRY FOUNDLING
I
In the heart of a man there are many chambers. Some of these chambers
have locked doors and behind them the world may not penetrate. Dusty,
discarded shrines are there with the idols chipped and broken; coffers
rotted with money may lie scattered about; brittle bouquets of faded
flowers; a coffin plate or two, or perhaps the more grisly husks of dead
romances that arise during slumber and break out wailing, haunting the
long, barren corridors of the subconscious mind and only laid by
sunlight. But among these chambers somewhere is one sweet, clandestine
room only unlocked with a golden key on a diamond ring, where warm and
ruddy light floods out when the door is opened. Luxury awaits him
within, but greater than luxury: the mistress of his soul, soft-armed,
starry-eyed, radiant with love. Back over far years or few, when that
mistress entered that heart-chamber and consented to remain imprisoned
there forever, then was Everyman’s Amethyst Moment.
Man, like the caliphs of old, may possess a thousand wives. But his
heart has one mistress only—forever.
There is another phase of this narrative which it is expedient to begin
in order to make long preparation for Nathan’s Amethyst Moment. It
starts in the city of Springfield, Massachusetts, on a September
afternoon twenty years in the past. Upon an iron settee at the edge of a
Forest Park lily pond a woman sank to rest and to watch a group of
shrieking children playing with the swans.
She was a middle-aged woman, tall, comely, deep-chested, one of those
well-favored, high-caste matrons vaguely associated with sweeping,
trailing, draping house gowns, with strings of jet and jade licking
against her knees and an exotic perfume clinging about her personality
like old rose or lavender.
This afternoon she was clothed in black, black walking dress, large
black hat, black fur neckpiece, smooth black gloves. She was the widow
of a high army officer, killed seven months before in the Philippines.
Her name was Gracia Theddon and she lived—somehow—on the income from
half a million dollars.
This woman’s face grew wistful as she watched the children. She wanted
to call them about her. Then she realized that seven of the ten were
clothed alike. The types were too varied to make them brothers and
sisters. She was puzzled.
As she watched, one of the smallest youngsters poised on the edge of the
water and almost fell forward. In that instant a little girl flashed
from a near-by summer house and pulled the baby back from danger.
The child whose watchful eye and quick coördination of mind and body had
effected this tiny rescue seized and held Gracia Theddon’s attention.
She was slender and dark, the most delicately wrought little girl that
had ever moved into Mrs. Theddon’s scheme of things. Her features were
cut with the clearness of a cameo. She had strangely calm eyes,
extraordinary eyes, even for a child.
The woman finally summoned a youngster, a precocious youngster of few
illusions.
“Who’s that little girl, boy?” she asked. “The one with the pretty face
and long black curls.”
“Whatcher wanner knowfer?”
Mrs. Theddon found a dime in the tiny bead bag at her girdle.
“Now tell me the little girl’s name and what you know about her.”
“Name’s Leggy—it’s short for sumpin’—Leeg—Leeg—sumpin’ like Leegar.”
“You mean Allegra?”
“Uh-huh!”
“And what’s her last name?”
“Ain’t got none. She didn’t have no fadder nor mudder like the rest of
us. The fairies brought her. Leggy says so! Say, there ain’t no fairies,
are there?”
“So that’s why you’re all dressed alike. You’re orphans.” Mrs. Theddon’s
eyes went back to the little girl. “And who’s looking out for you?”
“Leggy is. We couldn’t come to the Park at all if it warn’t fer her.
She’s a cuckoo, Leggy is. She says she saw Santa Claus once. Say, there
ain’t no Santa Claus, is there?”
“I used to think so, little boy.”
“I arst Miss Howlan’ once. But she got mad and tol’ me to get the hell
out and stop askin’ foolish questions, or she’d slap my mouth——”
“Who’s Miss Howland?”
“She runs the dump we live at. She’s a quince and can’t get married.
Say, you’re rich, aincher? Is that a real bird on your hat?”
“And does this Miss Howland swear so before you children?”
“Huh, hell ain’t swearin’. I know lots o’ words worse’n hell. So’s Miss
Howland. Gee, you oughta hear her rip when she gets mad. She says goddam
an’——”
“Stop, boy, stop! I merely wish to know about that little girl. What’s
the name of the Orphanage where you live?”
“The Corpses is Christened—or sumpin’ sounds like it.”
“You mean Corpus-Christi?”
“Uh-huh! Guess so!”
“And how long has that little girl been at the Corpus-Christi
Orphanage?”
“Since ’fore the world was made, I guess—a nawful long time. She b’longs
to Miss Howlan’.”
“Belongs to her!”
“Yeah! Miss Howlan’s fixed it so Leggy can’t be adopted. When people
come and wanner kid, the first they allus grab is Leggy. So Miss
Howlan’s hooked her up, and Leggy’ll have to stay to the place and be a
orphan till she’s old and got grand-chillun. Miss Howlan’ said she done
a good job when she hooked Leggy. I heard her tell Bridget; she cooks
the stuff we eat and then eats it herself.”
“And you’re sure you never heard the little girl’s last name?”
“Say, wasser matter wicher? I said she ain’t got none, din’t I? She
warn’t born like the rest of us. They found her sleepin’ on a haycock in
a field. It was near some woods where the fairies stole out and left
her. Say, what’s a haycock?”
“And how long ago was it they found her?”
“Gee, you’re thick, aincher? I said it was a nawful long time back,
’fore my fadder busted my mudder open, and then skipped so he wouldn’t
have to go to jail, and they shoved me in the Corpses is Christened dump
to be a orphan——”
The boy’s worldly wisdom disturbed Mrs. Theddon so painfully that she
finally dismissed him in relief.
Then she called the Fairy Foundling.
The child approached with a dainty deference that won the rich woman
instantly—if she had not been won from the first.
This was no laborer’s offspring.
Mrs. Theddon was almost minded to believe in fairies after all.
II
The following day a pair of handsome grays stopped before the
Corpus-Christi Orphanage. Mrs. Theddon alighted from her carriage,
instructed her coachman to wait and went up the broken steps to the grim
front door.
The Orphanage was a mediocre double house in the poorer quarter of the
city; only a battered sign tacked to the greenish clapboards indicated
its character. Mrs. Theddon’s ring was answered by an angular female who
believed in infant damnation, the prohibition issue and the curse of the
idle rich. Her hair was drawn tightly from her square, sallow forehead,
her shoulders were sharp, her face on a man would have created a perfect
butler for the lower class motion pictures.
“I am Mrs. Gracia Theddon,” announced the first, “and I have called to
see you about a certain child you have here—a little Allegra
Something-or-other.”
“You mean you want to adopt her?”
“If it’s possible.”
“It isn’t possible! Allegra’s my own.”
“So I understand. But I want little Miss Allegra myself and I’m—well—I’m
prepared to make it worth while to be reasonable.”
Thereat the Howland person thawed somewhat,—not much.
“Come in,” she conceded.
She led the way into a bare cheerless “office.” Mrs. Theddon sat down
and raised her black veil.
“I saw the child in the Park yesterday. I talked with her. And when I
got home last night—in bed—I realized—how very much I should like to
have such a little girl. I have no children. My husband was killed last
year in the Philippines.”
Miss Howland, it developed, was a “toe-tapper” and a Competent Person.
Moreover, she had dealt with finicky patronesses of the Orphanage for
years. She tapped her toe now, though her face maintained its wooden
expression.
“So I understand, Mrs. Theddon. But you see—I also love Allegra—she is
such a help to me about the place——”
“You don’t make that delicate little girl work!”
“No, no! Not work! Merely a few chores to give her a sense of
responsibility—looking after the younger children and all that. They are
an awful care at times, Mrs. Theddon—an awful care.”
Mrs. Theddon was duly solicitous. She knew the Howland type and how to
“handle” it. Ten minutes were spent ingratiating herself into the
superintendent’s sympathies and the Howland woman thawed.
“But what do you know about the child?” Mrs. Theddon asked.
“They found her in a hayfield over toward Ludlow ten years ago last
summer. But no one reported a lost child. When the papers advertised
her, no one came forward to identify or claim her. So they brought her
here.”
“And you don’t know her last name?”
“Nothing about her whatever. I gave her the name Allegra, and of course
when I adopted her, she got my own——”
“Then you have legally adopted her?”
“Well, all the red tape isn’t finished yet. I just say I’ve adopted her
when people come here for babies because they always pick the prettiest
first. And Leggy’s turned out so clever I could better afford to lose
some of the older, homelier ones——”
Mrs. Theddon saw the psychological moment had arrived.
“Miss Howland,” she announced firmly, “I want that child badly. But I
don’t want her badly enough to haggle over her. I’ll write you a check
this moment for a thousand dollars—and not another cent more. But it’s
on the understanding that all the legalities are settled by you with the
trustees and the girl is delivered at my home before the coming
Saturday!”
If Mrs. Theddon had drawn a revolver and shot the Howland person, the
latter could not have sat more totally and adequately stunned.
“A—thou—sand—dol—lars!”
“Exactly. A thousand dollars!” Mrs. Theddon’s patronage had gone. She
had the crisp poise she used when bargaining with servants or tradesmen.
It took several moments for Miss Howland to recover. A hundred dollars
would have been a great persuader. But a _thousand_!
Then her narrow, crafty nature roused from the mental stupor which the
offer had produced. If the Theddon woman would pay a thousand dollars,
she must want the child very much indeed. Miss Howland flattered herself
she knew these pampered, petulant women. She gave facial indications of
thrust-and-parry.
“I couldn’t——”
“Very well,” announced Mrs. Theddon. “I withdraw my offer and bid you
good-day. But I shall use my influence in certain quarters to secure the
child without the payment of a cent. I made you a fair offer to avoid
legal procedure and undesirable publicity. But now I withdraw it!”
Mrs. Theddon lowered her veil and prepared to depart—which she had not
the least intention of doing.
“Wait a moment!” cried Miss Howland weakly. At once she abandoned any
attempt to dicker. It was too risky. “I was about to say I couldn’t
desire anything better than to think of little Allegra being adopted by
a nice lady like yourself——”
Mrs. Theddon produced her check book.
III
A little, misery-eyed, wood thrush of a girl in a drab-blue pinafore
crept out from her hiding place under a corner desk. She fled across the
“office”, up the back stairs and into her “room”, a cot under an alcove,
before the Howland person returned from the gate where she had enviously
watched the grays drive away.
The little girl had overheard. Parentless, nameless, she had been sold
by one person and bought by another,—for a thousand dollars!
The intuitive horror of her nonentity, of that sale and purchase, never
left the little girl,—not even twenty years later in womanhood.
She crouched—a tiny mite in blue gingham—on the cot and failed to answer
Miss Howland when the latter went through the house, calling for her
angrily.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER V
IMPRESSIONS
I
Looking back on those days in Foxboro Center now, Nathan and I think of
them as Nuggets of Time from the Golden Mine of Boyhood, unalloyed. I
would like to transcribe whole pages from the Memory Book, all of which
has contributed to the great mass of experience influencing the most
vital parts of our lives. Yet the subject matter is too trivial and the
type too fine to ask a busy world to read.
There are no woods now like those Nathan and I explored in those days.
There are no valleys so peaceful, no afternoons so long, no twilights so
soft, no stars so high.
Thrushes and peewees sang in the leafy silences of those woodlands.
Cloistered glades would be suddenly desecrated by the shrill screeches
of jays. Brooks babbled unexpectedly across marshy pathways, to be
forded on mossy stones. Jack-in-the-Pulpits and Lady’s Slippers grew
among the smooth brown needles of hemlock-roofed hillsides.
Occasionally, when lying in the forest quiet, we would hear the tread of
a lone partridge on last autumn’s brittle leaves as sharp and loud as
the tread of a man.
But alas and alack! Nathan’s little sister often “tagged after us,”
demanding petulantly to be helped over stone walls, around bramble
patches and across ditches, getting her feet wet in bogs and squealing
hideously if we traveled too fast or gave the slightest indication of
abandoning her to forest terrors.
There is only one thing more tragic to a small boy than having a little
sister to bother him. That is having an elder sister to “boss” him.
There were rainy days, too, when we explored old attics, playing among
heirlooms and relics that to-day would be worth much money. There were
days when we invented weird pastimes in the fantastic nooks, crannies
and haylofts of two fragrant country barns.
Sometimes in the spring, when the winter is breaking up and the soil is
coming through in patches, sweet and wet, I catch a breath of fragrance
from those Foxboro play-times. I smell again the clear, cool, pungent
dampness of woodland ravines where we poked noisy leaves aside to find
the first mayflowers. The odor of summer pastures in the sunset comes to
me and the sweet scent of ripening huckleberries, briarbloom and fern.
Autumn brings its scents and odors, too—crimson sumach and bursting
milkweed; the acrid sweetness of loaded apple trees with windfallen
fruit knobbing the ground beneath; old goldenrod; the sharp nip of
frost-bitten air blowing fitfully across the hills on afternoons when
the earth shivered in the nakedness of fall and the sky was a museum of
cloud. Then winter came with gray days—soft-muffled, snow-heavy—moist
mornings, dripping noons, melancholy twilights when even the carmine of
the sinking sun was freezing cold; then the piercing stab of blue
crystal nights when the stars were very high and the panes of windows in
empty rooms were weirdly padded with frost.
Who can fathom the heart of a boy? I recall these items especially here,
because there were times when I would find my friend indisposed to play.
Often in these seasons and settings, he would stop and grow strangely
silent. “It’s so pretty, Billy, it hurts,” he would tell me. “It makes
me—afraid!”
One summer evening we sat on the Forge front steps under the stars. The
crickets were cheeping about us. Now and then we saw ghostly petals of
syringa blossoms flutter down in the shadows beneath, the world
voluptuous with summer scents about us.
“I feel as if I’d like to write and tell somebody all about it, Billy,”
he said to me.
“Tell ’em what?”
“How it hurts!”
“How what hurts?”
“Oh—the world—and starry nights—just livin’ in it all. It’s holy
somehow—like church.”
Faint piano music floated up the valley. Somewhere below a sweet soprano
voice was singing “The Blue and the Gray.”
I choose to think of that night as the first time the poet-soul of my
friend was disclosed to me. Yet I would have pooh-poohed poetry—then. It
was stagy stuff to be recited hectically in school on Friday afternoons,
beginning, “I am dying, Egypt, dying!” and the demise complete before a
dozen lines had been rendered.
“Billy, do you s’pose all men when they was boys felt like you and me?”
“Aw, I guess so.”
“Wish I knew for sure, Billy.”
“What for?”
“I dunno. Maybe it’d make things easier to stand.”
II
As Nathan’s sister Edith grew older, her petulancy of mouth became more
pronounced. Like most small sisters her recreational specialty was
ferreting out breaches of deportment on the part of us boys and carrying
dirty little tales to our parents. Johnathan and his wife indirectly
encouraged this sort of thing. They thought it “cute.”
One afternoon Edith broke a barn window. She declared at once that
Nathan did it. The brother’s protestations of innocence availed him
nothing. He was punished on Edith’s unconfirmed say-so. Thereupon Edith
discovered she held a power over Nathan. She could blackmail him into
doing almost anything whim dictated by committing petty damage herself
and accusing the boy as the miscreant.
This went on for the better part of the autumn. Finally Edith overdid
it. One evening she accused Nathan of having let the horse out of the
boxstall. She swore she saw him. She gave a convincing and vivid account
as an eye-witness. Only it happened Nathan had been with his father down
in the village all the afternoon, unknown to Edith.
Caught in a bald-faced lie, Edith snickered. Then she slapped her
brother’s face as being somehow responsible.
Edith was not chastised for falsehood, but Nathan got his ears boxed
soundly for “daring to lay a finger on his little sister” when he
defended himself.
In fact, Mrs. Forge thought the escape of the horse and Edith’s
discomfiture a rather good joke. If there was wrong in it, Edith would
“grow out of it.” Of course! She was a girl!
That night Mrs. Forge read Nathan a homily on chivalry. There were many
things boys could not do without punishment that were perfectly
permissible for little girls.
III
Johnathan Forge “failed” at his store in the Center, as he appeared to
fail at everything everywhere. He became convinced he “could do better
in a larger place.” Thus came a certain day when Nathan raced up to my
house bursting with excitement.
“We’re going to move to Paris! We’re going to move to Paris!” he cried.
“Dad’s got a job in the newspaper office and we’re going as soon’s we
can pack our things.”
Going to Paris, Vermont, at that age, was like going to Paris, France,
in these later years. It was not something to be negotiated. It was
something to be attained.
The day the family left town I hung about the Forge house all the
forenoon, divided between doing the work of two men gratis, or getting
in the way so skillfully that Johnathan Forge was moved to profanity.
But the goods were loaded at last and after dinner Nat came over in his
“best clothes” to bid me good-by.
We spoke as two who are going different ways into far countries. We made
light of the situation and the play-times we had enjoyed together,
though God knows the tears were close to our eyelids.
“I left a swell pair of baby-carriage wheels up in the wigwam in the
woods. But you can have ’em for a peach of a cart,” he said generously.
A pair of “swell baby-carriage wheels” was a treasure beyond price among
boys in those days. Yet I was thinking with an awful heart-pinch that
Nathan and I would never play in that wigwam of leaves and brush again.
“I suppose you’ll always stay here in Foxboro,” he went on, with the
condescension of the city mouse for the country cousin. “But if you
ever come to Paris, I’ll expect you to visit me. I’ll probably always
live in Paris. It’s a big place. There’s more advantages and
op-op-opportunities.”
We spoke stiffly and indifferently as the parting grew nearer.
“Well, guess I’ll have to be going,” he said. “Good-by.”
“Good-by,” I said. “Maybe some day when we grow up we’ll meet again.”
“Yes, good-by.”
“Good-by.”
John Forge was driving his family over the road in a democrat wagon. I
came to the gate to wave to them as they passed down the road and around
the turn. Then the vehicle turned the corner and the road was empty.
The road? The world was empty. For the first time in my life I knew
loneliness—horrible, unbearable, numbing loneliness—worse than the loss
of my father!
My mother came up to put me to bed that night. She understood my tight
silence. I was trying hard to keep my nerve, but the thought of coming
days, weeks, months, years without Nat was dawning upon me in all its
hideous emptiness.
That night I was very glad I had a mother and that she was not
twitching-faced and pin-pointed of eye like Nathan’s.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER VI
THE ODD STICK
I
My mother’s savings were exhausted in the spring of 1900. The payments
on her pension were delayed. The good woman was almost alone in the
world with a seam-ripping, button-bursting, small boy who demanded to be
clothed, fed, educated. Rather than submit to the slavery of keeping
house for some widowed farmer, she decided to move to Paris also and try
to find work in a store.
Thus I ultimately rejoined Nathan.
He did not greet me as effusively as I had expected. His indifference
hurt. But I soon made allowance. Nathan was in love. The object of his
affections was Bernie Gridley.
“Come over to my house and tell me all about her,” I invited that first
noontime.
“After school? I can’t. I work.”
“You work! Where?”
“I peddle papers every night—_Telegraphs_.”
“You mean you make real money? Gee, that’s swell.”
Nat shut his lips.
“Aw, I don’t get nothin’. Pa makes me do it. He takes it and uses it to
help out at home.”
“But you do the work and so the money belongs to you!”
“Yeah! But pa figgers he’s supportin’ me and he had to work when he was
a boy—and turn over the money to his father. So he makes me do the
same.”
“I’d like to see _my_self——”
“Aw, you’re talkin’ through your hat! Whatter you know about havin’ a
father? Your father died! Hang it all, some guys have all the luck!”
II
Nathan was “goin’ on fourteen” now. He had grown older, somehow, older
than the twenty months which had intervened since I had last seen him
warranted.
These three—Nathan, the Dresden Doll and a shocky-headed young
troglodyte who had just arrived from the wilds of Foxboro Center—were
seated near one another during that year in the seventh grade of the old
Academy on the hill.
The American public school being the great common denominator for
juvenile humanity, it had developed after several months’ scholastic
propinquity between Nathan and Bernie that he was not quite so
impossible as the Dresden Doll had at first assumed. And Bernie’s
teachers had rather caustic ideas about the Gridley “blood.” The Dresden
Doll became a little more human.
“What are you going to give me for my birthday, boy?” she demanded of
Nathan one day, accosting him on the edge of the school yard. “I’m going
to have a party, you know. Everybody’s coming and must bring me
something.”
The abruptness of meeting and question left Nathan speechless. With his
temperament and home training—or lack of it—it was only natural he
should have been awkward in her presence.
But he finally rallied.
“Well, I’ll try to give you something bigger ’n better than you’ll get
from anybody else. You can bet on that!”
His declaration implied a promise. Moreover, after the nature of such
youthful indiscretions, it grew plain he would have to make that promise
good or be forever discredited and go through the rest of life a
celibant.
What could he give her that would be greater and finer and better than
any other person—chiefly boy—might offer? It became an awful quandary.
Though only “goin’ on fourteen”, it came to him he had thrust a foot
into one of life’s traps. In his little cot-bed up under the eaves of
the cottage John Forge had taken for his family in Spring Street, he
pondered feverishly far into each night. And with sickening speed the
date of the affair approached and found him still debating.
The underlying cause of his predicament was financial. He hadn’t a cent,
was never allowed money and would have to steal and lie to get any. If
he had millions he could of course present her with a diamond ring or a
Maltese cat or something like that. But not a cent! It was humiliating.
The solution finally came via the unwitting agency of the Duchess. She
called on Mrs. Forge to purchase some geranium slips and remained to
discuss the precocity of Bernice-Theresa.
“I am convinced she will be literary,” the Duchess declared. “She has
already finished the Bible, ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ and ‘Rollo’s Travels in
Switzerland.’ I think I shall start her next on the poets.”
Nathan’s mother asked which poets. And the Duchess answered: “I
understand ‘Dauntless Inferno’ by John Milton is being read these days
by all the best people. After that I shall try Shakespeare. He’s so
romantic!”
Nathan lay in bed that night, turning this sudden literary proclivity of
the Gridley girl over in his mind. Then, by the strange and wonderful
convolutions of a boy’s brain, he had it! He could scarcely wait until
morning to get to Weathersbee & Hawkins’ Second-hand Furniture Store.
There, after much mysterious maneuvering, he contracted for the article
he sought, agreeing to saw wood for Mr. Hawkins Saturdays to pay for it.
He carried it home the night before the memorable birthday party and hid
it in the loft of the Forge woodshed.
The affair began at two-thirty the next day. Twenty-seven boys and
girls, painfully starched and ironed, gathered awkwardly upon the
Gridley lawn. A table had been placed beside the veranda steps and upon
it the birthday gifts were deposited. Article by article the pile grew,
some of them pathetically inexpensive, a few indicating want of taste
far more than worldly goods.
When the Forge boy looked upon the daintiness and delicacy of most of
the gifts, an awful qualm smote him. He wondered if he might not have
overdone the present business in his anxiety to make an impression? But
Bernice was demanding impatiently to know how he had fulfilled his
promise. There was no time to reconsider now—certainly not to go back
and buy another present. He went to a secret place in the hedge and
brought his gift from its hiding.
Across the lawn he carried it with difficulty, for it was nearly as
large as himself. To the gift-altar he brought it, small heart
palpitating painfully.
“My goodness!” exclaimed the little patrician. “Whatever can it be?”
The children, patronized by a few mothers, gathered around to learn what
the Forge boy had brought his dainty little hostess which should leave
all present speechless by its cleverness and elegance. Nathan, badly
scared, unwound copious quantities of newspaper and cast them aside.
Then, using all his thirteen-year strength, up onto the table amid the
lesser gifts, its weight causing that table to rock rather groggily for
a moment, Nathan added—a life-sized bust of Julius Cæsar. Cæsar. In
chalk!
The Duchess raised her lorgnette. She and Cæsar exchanged mutual glances
of stupefaction for an instant.
“But who is it?” she demanded.
“It must be a new kind of a big doll!” exclaimed a little girl with
violent pigtails.
“Why—why—it’s a—it’s a——” Nathan wanted all present to understand that
it was sculpture of most poetic motif having to do with the literary
ramifications of one W. Shakespeare. But he could not recall the words
“sculpture”, “statue” or “bust.”
“It’s a monument!” he choked. “For Julius Cæsar—I mean _of_ Julius
Cæsar. He divided Gaul into three parts and they stabbed him!”
“A monument!” cried the Duchess. “Stabbed him! And do you think he’s
buried hereabouts, that Bernice-Theresa should be edified with his
tombstone for a plaything?”
“You told Ma that Bernie was goin’ to read the best poets. I thought o’
this mon-mon-monument I s-s-seen in Weatherbee’s store. He’s got an ear
gone and his nose is bunged and maybe he needs washin’. But as far’s the
missin’ ear goes, you could stand it in a corner somewheres so’s his
head would be against the wall——”
“My God!” choked the Duchess. “William! William! Where’s William?”
William Chew, the elderly person of color, came forward.
“William,” cried the Duchess, “remove this nightmare. God love us! It
looks as if this unspeakable boy had brought Bernice-Theresa the upper
half of somebody’s whitewashed corpse!”
“Yes, ma’am!” assented William. “What yo’ want ah should do with it,
ma’am?”
“Do with it?” gasped the Duchess. “Take it home to your family! Set it
up on your front lawn! Hand it down to your children! Only get the
hideous thing off these premises and never bring it back!”
William obediently toted off the bust. Then the Duchess looked about for
the giver of this good and perfect gift. But Nathan had reached the gate
and was fleeing down the walk. For him there was no party.
William took the “monument” home. The last seen of it was atop a post in
the center of the Chew cornfield. The colored man had draped a coat
around the classic bust, hung trousers beneath it, put an old straw hat
on the brow that produced the Commentaries, and relegated it to the job
of scaring off the crows. Its end came when old Webster Nelson wandered
into the field one night under the influence of liquor, beheld the
chalky features beneath the hat, and reduced it to fragments under the
crazed obsession that he was being confronted by the supernatural.
III
A little girl makes love to a boy in school by the simple expedient of
allowing him to discover her eyes upon him steadily when he raises his
head from his studies and looks in her direction. Nathan dragged himself
to school next day. But the topaz eyes of Bernice-Theresa were not upon
him,—once! Thereupon did life become a delusion and a snare and sorrow
sit heavily upon him.
The Dresden Doll came out of the Academy at four o’clock and started
homeward. By some mysterious levitation, she had not progressed three
blocks before the street held a party of the opposite sex employed in
touching every other picket in the fence, withal moving in her own
direction.
“Say!” this person demanded plaintively, having somehow crossed the
thoroughfare by the time she reached the Baptist Church. “Are you mad at
me, Bernie?”
“Of course I’m mad! Why shouldn’t I be mad? You tried to spoil my
party.”
“I didn’t mean to spoil your party.”
“Perhaps you didn’t. But you’re such a fool at times!”
“A fool!”
“Why do you do such perfectly silly things?”
“I—I—only tried to give you somethin’ different, Bernie. I—only—tried—to
make you like me.”
“Then you don’t know much about girls! For instance—your clothes! Why,
you came to my party looking like a—a—tramp!”
“They were my best clothes, Bernie—the best I got.”
“Then why on earth doesn’t your father buy you some new?”
“He says it’s puttin’ on style—and foolish.”
“But you look so! Can’t he see it?”
“I guess, Bernie, he don’t much care—or understand.”
“Then I’d work—and buy my own.”
“I do work. But he makes me give him all I earn.”
“Then I’d run away—or shoot him!”
She tossed her long mass of straw-colored curls haughtily and walked
from sight.
John Forge had not been able to hold his job in the newspaper office. He
“didn’t get along with people.” He had opened a small shop on Main
Street and gone back to cobbling shoes. Next day Ben Williams, the
clothier, looked in at the Forge door and with half a laugh demanded:
“Can’t you dress that young one of yours so he won’t go around makin’ a
nuisance of himself, John Forge? He was in my place this noon with a
crazy plea for me to save all my bundles for Saturdays so he could
deliver ’em and earn himself a suit to look respectable.”
John Forge went home with his weak jaw set grimly.
“I’ll break that boy’s foolish pride—or I’ll break his back!” he
promised himself dourly.
IV
Nathan lay back in the hammock in the summer-evening depths of the front
piazza and dreamed dreams with his eyes open. Down the street old man
Bailey’s phonograph was grinding out a squeaky program of popular
ballads. The moths were clustering around the sputtering arc lamps. On
the near-by corner the Allen girl was shamelessly “flirting with a
feller” who sat on his bicycle alongside the curb, one foot upon it to
steady himself. Occasionally the girl tested the bell on the handle
bars, and it ding-donged a high and low musical note interspersed with
low laughter. The flirtation hurt Nathan. He was jealous of the older
fellow’s freedom from “careful” parents.
“On’y seven years more—just seven years!—then I can marry her,” the poor
young colt told himself. “Marry her whether Pa’ll let me or not. Oh,
Bernie, Bernie, I love you. I love you more than anything else in the
world! You’ll never understand!”
It was only half-past seven o’clock and yet his father appeared and
ordered him in to bed.
“Look here, you young pup,” the man intercepted as Nat drearily obeyed,
“—what’s this nonsense I’m hearing about you traipsin’ around behind
some girl? Do you?”
“N-N-No, sir!”
“I don’t believe you!—Else folks around town wouldn’t be talking. If you
lie to me I’ll lay on the strap. Now who is the girl and what about her?
Answer me quick, or it’ll be worse for you!”
“I don’t know what you mean!”
A shrill cry of pain followed as the man twisted the boy’s ear.
“Answer me!” he thundered.
“B-B-Bernice Gridley,” Nat confessed.
“Well—you let me lay down a law right here and now! No son of mine is
going to make a young jackass of himself—or ruin his life—by getting
mixed up with any girl before he’s old enough to know his own mind! You
put girls out of your mind once and for all, the same as when we lived
over in Foxboro you were told to put the baby business out of your mind!
You hear me? Don’t you ever be seen on the street with a girl. Don’t you
ever speak to one excepting when you’re absolutely obliged to—on
strictly business! Don’t you ever let me hear of you goin’ to any party
where there’s girls—while as for loving or kissing ’em—my God, I’ll skin
you alive if I find you up to any such looseness and wickedness. You
promise that here and now—before me and before God—and may God damn your
disobedient young soul if you go back on your promise.”
Nathan was aghast. Johnathan tortured the boy until he got his promise
out.
This was a Thursday evening. The church bells were droning idly in the
soft summer dusk. Having heard young Nathan climb sobbing into his
creaking bed (while other boys were still playing “Duck on the Rock” out
under the Adams Street arc light) Johnathan Forge went to prayer
meeting. There he made his ten-minute weekly testimony about how
precious Jesus had been to his soul since the previous Thursday and how
he—Johnathan—prayed in all things to be guided by the Father’s loving
care.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER VII
EXQUISITE THINGS
I
Mrs. Gracia Theddon, writing in her upstairs library the Saturday
morning after her visit to the Orphanage, was disturbed by one Murfins,
her butler. Murfins merely thrust in his head, being florid and coatless
from directing the cleaning of near-by rooms.
“The small girl you spoke of Tuesday is here, ma’am,” was his simple way
of announcing news to transcend all future events in Gracia Theddon’s
life.
The woman arose, gripping her chair-back with one hand, the other
quieting her heart.
“Bring her up, Murfins,” she directed huskily.
It was a new rôle for Mrs. Theddon, that of mother. Capable of directing
as brilliant a social galaxy as the annual Charity Ball, she waited
unnerved for the advent of a tiny, dark-eyed stranger.
Three minutes later the foster-mother beheld her new child come down the
room.
The Fairy Foundling had removed her twenty-cent hat of brown straw and
shaken free her dusky, ribbonless tresses. She wore a drab Orphanage
frock which only reached her knees, her stockings were thick and
shapeless and her shoes had emphatically been selected for service and
not for style. Yet the child in either sackcloth or satin would have
divulged equal quality. There was no cheap sniggering bashfulness, no
clodhopper shyness in her demeanor. But there was reserve and painful
anxiety not unmixed with a little dread. Her cameo features were pale.
Her delicate rosebud lips disclosed teeth like chips of porcelain. Her
deep brown eyes—almost black—held that same queer calmness, but those
eyes could easily turn starry, as Mrs. Theddon discovered in the next
few moments.
“Makes me think she’s always on the point of wanting to weep with
happiness, yet smilin’ through tears that don’t quite come,” was old
Murfins’ way of describing those eyes to Stebbins, the second man. To
which sentiments Stebbins subscribed avidly,—though with picturesque
variations.
Six feet from Mrs. Theddon the little girl halted.
“So you’ve come,” was all that perturbed woman could call up at the
moment. She meant it kindly yet she realized it was the wrong thing—not
at all cordial and maternal. And she greatly longed to be cordial and
maternal and set riotously free the tenderness aching in her soul for
expression.
“Yes’m,” returned the Fairy Foundling, with a tight swallow,”—I’ve
come.”
“And you’d like to be my little girl?”
“I’d like to be anybody’s little girl that” (swallow) “wanted me.”
Mrs. Theddon sank sideways upon her chair. She could feel every throb of
her heart, count its ragged beatings.
Suddenly, as the wistful figure stood there, never so parentless, her
frailness and smallness accentuated by the great room above her, the
rich woman held out her arms.
“Baby!” she cried brokenly. “Come!”
Murfins went back to his cleaning.
“Well, I’ll be damned!” he cried. “Didn’t know the old girl had it in
her. Just goes to prove that folks don’t always match their outsides!
Yes, I’ll be damned! I’ll be damned a couple of times—maybe three!”
“Do you know how long I’ve wanted a little girl and never knew what it
was I wanted?” Mrs. Theddon asked when her emotions permitted.
“No, ma’am,” the princess answered.
“It’s been a long, long time! God never sent me a little girl of my
own—excepting my Dream Girl, dear.”
“Your Dream Girl?”
“Sometimes in dark nights I dreamed a little girl—somebody very like
yourself, came to me—and——”
“Please don’t cry, Mrs. Theddon!”
“We’re going to be so happy, you and I! You must forget the Orphanage or
that you ever knew it. You must try to believe you’ve lived with me
always. You’re going to have pretty dresses and a beautiful room. You’re
going to have all sorts of nice people to teach you and help you. And
good times!—we’re going to have all sorts of parties and walks and
travels together, you and I—and then some day—all I own will be
yours—because you’re all I’ll have, all—I—have—now!”
“That will be awfully fine,” the little girl replied joyously.
Most children would have been abashed or thoughtlessly ecstatic. The
Fairy Foundling was not unappreciative, yet a fine reserve seemed bred
in her blood and fiber. This environment of culture and refinement,
instead of distressing her, placed her vaguely at ease.
“And please, dear—please don’t call me ‘Mrs. Theddon.’ I’m Mrs. Theddon
to every one but you. You are to be different from the rest. Call me—if
you can—call me mother! Would you call me mother, little girl?”
“I’d love to call you mother!”
The child smiled up sweetly into the woman’s aching eyes. And something
caught in Mrs. Theddon’s throat. Only for an instant. Then another great
wave of maternity swept through her tightened breast and long-repressed
motherhood welled up gloriously,—fine and overwhelming and golden and
true.
II
Mrs. Theddon led the child down the outer hallway into a small room
which opened from her own. White and blue was the color scheme in an
atmosphere of silken daintiness. Two windows opened upon a wide panorama
of the Connecticut Valley and the river, far-flung from north to south
below.
Little frocks were laid upon the counterpane. The dressing table was as
complete as the boudoir appointments of feminine royalty. Beyond the
chamber opened a diminutive, white-tiled bath.
“The workmen finished it yesterday afternoon, dear. I made them rush to
complete it in time for you to-day. Now I’m going to bathe and dress
you—myself. I want to do it! Marie, your maid, will not arrive until
Monday. But that was arranged on purpose. For the first two days—I
wanted—to accustom you to it, myself. I want us to get acquainted. You
don’t mind, do you, dear?” She asked it anxiously, as though the child
were a guest as old as herself.
“Oh, mother—dear—I’m—so happy! It’s a dream come true.”
“A dream come true?” Mrs. Theddon repeated the words dazedly. “And have
you ever dreamed of things like these, little girl?”
“Lots and lots of times. Somehow the Orphanage seemed a place where I
was staying for just a little while—until somebody I belonged to came
after me.”
“I’m so glad you’re not—like—the other Orphanage children, dear. I
thought in some ways you might be. But—you don’t know—how pleased—I am!”
“I’m just me,” the princess affirmed. “And it seems like—coming home!”
The mother bathed and dressed the child, calling a servant to carry away
the Orphanage clothes. But if Mrs. Theddon had been pleasantly surprised
thus far, it was nothing to her overpowering satisfaction when she
beheld her little ward clothed in the habilaments better befitting her
character.
“You’re wonderful, girlie mine!” the woman whispered, as she surveyed
the transformation.
“And I think you’re wonderful, too,” the child answered.
And yet, twenty-four hours later, a gray Sunday twilight, Mrs. Theddon
entered her chamber to discover the child huddled in a window-chair,
sobbing convulsively.
“What’s the matter, darling?” cried the shocked woman. “Aren’t you
happy?”
The princess sought frantically to hide her tears.
“Yes’m—I’m happy—so happy it hurts. Yet—well, I guess I miss the orphans
already!”
“Miss them! You mean you’d rather be at the Orphanage than here with
me?”
“It isn’t the nice things—it isn’t you—it’s—it’s——”
“Yes, yes! What is it?”
“I guess it’s just the orphans—’specially the babies. I miss havin’ to
do things for ’em. For they needed an awful lot done for ’em, and—I was
happy because it was me that could do it.”
“But they have some one else to look after them now. They’re no worse
off because you’ve gone.”
“No’m. Perhaps not. I wasn’t ‘specially thinking of their side of it. I
was thinking of mine. They liked to have things done for ’em. They told
me so. Miss Howland got awful cross sometimes. And I felt happy because
I was ’preciated. That’s an awful nice word, ’preciated, isn’t it? I so
want folks to ’preciate me, Mrs. Thed—mother dear. I guess everybody
does, don’t they?—want to be ’preciated?”
Every one wants to be appreciated? Dear God in heaven!
“Child, what does put such mature thoughts into your little head?”
“If you’d wondered and wondered who you were, and never found out, maybe
you’d know how sad you could feel, thinking it was because nobody wanted
you and you wasn’t ’preciated.”
“You poor, maternal, romantic little lamb! You talk like a woman grown,
already.”
“Do grown-up ladies feel like that, Mrs. Thed—mother dear?”
Mrs. Theddon did not answer at once. Her voice was handicapped when she
responded:
“Real women do, I fancy, my darling. But maybe there are a lot who have
a cruel time showing it. Come, baby! Tell me—did any one ever pick you
up and rock you to sleep in their arms? Did any one ever try to sing you
a lullaby, child?”
“Not much, Mrs. Thed—mother. I always tried to do it to those littler
than me. But I loved to do it!” the princess cried suddenly.
“Let’s sit down in the rocker, child. And don’t weep any more. Because
you’ll never know how much you are appreciated here.”
The woman took the distraught, moist-eyed little girl in her arms. She
tried to soothe her by singing a lullaby. She had a rich contralto
voice, “trained” by a great Parisian master—for this!—to sing a little,
parentless girl to sleep. Yet she had to stop half way. She found that
her training had gone for naught. Her voice was cracked and jagged and
uneven and broken.
In that mellow pause, the child snuggled closer. She whispered in the
dusk:
“You’re just like a real mother, Mrs. Theddon. I guess I know now why
some of the babies at the Home stopped crying when I began to rock them
to sleep.”
The future opened radiantly for Mrs. Gracia Theddon then. And the past
dropped away, colorless and shallow and tinseled and wasted.
“Listen, dear,” she said finally. “I’m going to ask if you’ll do
something for me.”
“I’ll do anything in the world for you—that I can.”
“When Miss Howland took you into the Home, she called you Allegra. When
she partly adopted you, she gave you her own name—Howland. So while you
were at the Orphanage your name was Allegra Howland. But now that you’ve
left that life behind you, your last name is Theddon, like my own.”
“Yes’m.”
“I don’t like the name Allegra. I want you to let me change that too.
I’ve picked out a name I’d planned to call a little girl of my own, if
one ever came.”
“What is it, mother dear? I’m sure I’ll like it if you picked it out.”
“It’s—Madelaine!”
“It’s an awful pretty name,” said the child, after a moment’s silence.
“It’s so soft-sounding and pleasant, like all the rooms here in your
house—and your eyes and your voice—since I’ve been here and you started
to love me.”
“God help me!” whispered the rich woman. “Maybe You knew best, dear God.
It’s worth the dreary wait, after all!”
And so Madelaine Theddon came into existence. So she too started her
journey—a daintier, softer journey—toward Life’s Hilltop and the lambent
stars and the Amethyst Moment.
III
In the butler’s pantry old Murfins was straightening out the tradesmen’s
orders for a dinner party. Stebbins, near-by, was polishing liqueur
glasses with a flannel cloth.
“But I’m thinking there’s going to be family fireworks, Steb, when the
Ruggleses come home and hear what she’s done. They got an awful good
opinion of themselves—those Ruggleses. Amos’s wife threw an awful fit, I
heard, when her brother married the Missus which up to that time had
been practically a Nobody. Now there’s a child from an orphanage come to
get a look-see at the moneybags. Can you see ’em standing for it, Steb?”
“The Missus is too smart to have any will drawed that them Ruggleses can
break.”
“You never can tell, Steb. There’s lawyers and lawyers. Some of ’em
could drive a coach unscorched through hell.”
“Well, I hope young Gordon don’t get any of it—his aunt’s money, I mean.
He’s a bad one, Gordon is! Remember how he almost killed the roan colt
last time he was here? Murphy wasn’t goin’ to stand by and have no horse
abused like that. I seen it all. When he interfered, Gord went for him
with his quirt. If the Missus hadn’t showed up when she did, Mike’d
busted the young roughneck wide open.” Murphy was the Theddon coachman.
“She’s provin’ she’s a bit of an angel,” observed Murfins. “I’d hate to
see her get the short end of it.” He meant Madelaine.
They worked in silence for a few minutes. Then Stebbins remarked:
“Wonder how Gord’ll behave next time he comes to visit here and finds
the princess his aunt’s got out of an asylum.”
“Not an asylum, Steb. An asylum’s a crazy house where they store insane
lunatics that ain’t quite right in their heads!”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER VIII
PRAYER
I
Bernie Gridley soon acquired a girl chum, a boy-baiting little blond
with a profile like the face on an old-style quarter-dollar. Her name
was Elinore Carver.
As I was Nathan Forge’s squire, Elinore became my Heart’s Desire. Which
may read like “peanut” poetry but which really did possess so much
poetry at the time that I am allowing the euphony to remain.
Thus did our quartette facilitate the course of true love, conspire to
make it run smoothly and hoodwink our parents considered as being
meddlesome outsiders on general principle. Family catechisms in the
evening as to our associations during the day probed in vain for any
milk-and-water assignations so long as the parties on all sides could
swear truthfully that they had traveled during the shining hours with
those of their own sex and any propinquity came about in pairs and
purely by accident.
Although Bernie’s mother did her worst to keep her offspring an
exasperating little prig, still in her heart the Dresden Doll was a
daughter of Eve. And ere long it was accepted in school that she and
Nathan had been called and by one another chosen.
Peter Taro, the school’s bad boy, had individualistic ideas about it,
however. Peter was too crude, too far down in the social scale, to
acquire a sweetheart. Therefore he had a propensity to make light of the
tenderest sentiments of others. He would walk on the opposite side of
any Lover’s Lane—meaning any village street whereon boy and maid could
woo without the horrible possibility of being met by parents or those
who would carry tales to parents—and make of himself a general nuisance.
On picket fences with a stick he would beat a tom-tom. Or he would carry
on loud-voiced conversation with the Romeo in the case on subjects of
which the Juliet was ignorant. Being snubbed or rebuked, he sought
vengeance in rhyme. His lines apropos of Nathan’s affair ran:
“Get your fiddle and feel quite fiddley;
—Nathan Forge and Bernice Gridley!”
This sort of thing he shouted at the top of his lungs to the perplexity
of the neighborhood and the edification of the grown-up world in
general. Bernice affected to be furious. So ultimately Nathan had to
fight the Taro boy. Which he did—adequately.
It was the first fight of Nathan’s career—a “kid-fight” perchance—but no
less virile or significant on that account. For like many quiet,
peaceable men, when aroused the boy became a fury. Lithe as a cat,
nimble as a bantam-weight, he pounded Peter Taro until the blood-smeared
youngster fled.
Those were days of bliss and nights of heartburn. Vividly the hours come
back that we spent before kitchen mirrors, steam-misty with boiling
cabbage or wash-water of our homes, tying and retying our “cravats”,
plastering down our hair with pilfered bay rum. If we had the front of
our hair parted and well pasted down, and the toes of our shoes
reasonably shined, we were groomed satisfactorily for hymeneal
campaigning.
That each of us possessed a hat-lifting cowlick in the rear like the
business paraphernalia of a small porcupine and that our heels were
eternally yellow with mud were among the happy paradoxes of boyhood. We
were as we were when we looked in our mirrors—when we posed for
phrenological inventory and profile analysis. And besides, a good
soldier in either war or love never looks behind anyhow.
II
We had followed the two little girls homeward one afternoon, chaffing
and mauling each other as we would never have done if they had not been
somewhere about to see, when we returned along the Green River in the
afterglow. Eventually we threw ourselves down on a knoll. While we idled
there, the valley grew hushed and the stars came out.
“Say, Nat,” I demanded, “whatcher goin’ to be when you grow up?”
“A writer and a poet,” he answered without hesitation.
I pondered this. We were emerging from the period when manhood meant
freedom to turn pirate or Indian fighter. If Nathan had declared his
intention of becoming a locomotive engineer or a clown in a circus, I
should not have hesitated to take him at his word. But a writer—a poet!
“Aw, go on!” I retorted. “Poets don’t make no money!”
“I dunno’s I wanner make money.”
I looked at him. His face—growing a bit less freckled now—was held
between his hands as he lay on his chest and looked vaguely off across
the smooth river where the trout were jumping. But before I could
comment caustically on this he asked, “Whatter you gonna be, Billy?”
“I dunno. I’ll be a business man, I guess, and make barrels of money—as
much as Mr. Gridley.”
“What kind of business?”
“Oh, I dunno. I’ll own a factory, I guess—and be president of a bank
afterwards, so when I want money all I gotta do is go into my bank and
help myself.”
We lay in silence for several minutes. Then I persisted:
“If you’re gonna be a writer, whatcher gonna write?”
“Oh, books and poems and things—that hurt me so much sometimes when I
look at ’em.”
“Huh! That ain’t a regular business. That’s a lazy man’s job. Judge
Prescott says so. His daughter, Annie, married somebody who writes
poetry and the Judge has to support both of ’em. I heard him say so.
Betcha your pa don’t letcher, anyhow!”
“Betcher he will! Betcher he won’t have anything to say about it—damn
him!”
Nathan’s lips tightened. It was not petulancy; it was the bitterness of
mistreated childhood.
“You ought not to swear about your father, Nat,” I told him, horrified.
“Why not? Is it worse to say what I think than to go around with it
makin’ me mad inside?”
“No, but it’s wicked to swear about your folks. You won’t live long. The
Ten Commandments says so.”
“Aw, whatter I care for the old Ten Commandments? All the Bible and the
church and things is made for anyhow is to back up grown folks when they
wanner work off their hell on us kids!”
“Don’t you believe there’s a God?”
“Well, somebody probably made all the stars and trees and flowers—all
the pretty things. But it spoils it to think it’s the same person that
dad says is so precious to his soul every week in prayer meetin’. See
that evenin’ star now, Billy, hangin’ low over Haystack. Ain’t it
pretty? S’pose anybody that made such a shinin’ star would be in
partnership with a growed-up person who’s so tight he won’t buy his kid
a pair o’ pants? Billy, whatter we got all this God-business and
church-business crammed down our throats for? Why can’t we just drink it
in by comin’ out to a place like this, where it’s all quiet, and
watchin’ an evenin’ star?”
“But we gotta love our parents, Nat. The Bible says so!”
“Yeah—and the same Bible says we oughta be clean and peaceful and good
inside. And when a feller hates anybody like I hate my father, how can
he turn around and say he loves him and act like he loves him, when he
don’t?”
“All the same,” I reiterated, “the Bible says we gotta, and we have!”
“Well, I’ll do it till I’m twenty-one,” assented Nathan, “’cause I can’t
help myself. Then I’ll go to hell and roast, if it’s wicked—but I’ll
stop lovin’ him and do as I honest please. Between the time I’m
twenty-one and the time I go to hell, I’ll feel peaceful and satisfied
for a while, anyhow.”
I felt my friend was damning himself irrevocably, sinning against the
Holy Ghost. I had to get away from those sulphur fumes, so I went back
to poetry.
“Howja know you can write poetry to make your livin’ at it? Have you
tried?”
“Yeah! Lots of times. It’s a cinch!”
“You mean you’ve got some poems writ already?”
“Sure, slathers of ’em.”
“Where are they?”
“Home—locked up so Pa won’t get ’em—along with Bernie’s letters.”
“What’s your Ma think about you bein’ a poet?”
“Oh, she don’t think nothin’, only what a hard time she has with Pa and
that Edith will marry money.”
“Ain’t you ever talked with her about it?”
“I see myself!”
“Thunder! Can’t you go to your Ma and talk about—things—when you wanna?”
“No! ‘Stead o’ that, I have to listen to Ma’s troubles. And if I don’t
happen to agree with her, she gets to twitchin’ all over her face and
goes off to rock in the dark by herself. She tells me, ‘Oh, you’re
growin’ up into a small-sized edition of your father!’ Damn her, too!”
“But if you can’t talk with your Ma about things, and what you’re gonna
be when you’re growed up, who can you talk ’em with?”
“Don’t talk ’em with nobody—exceptin’ you sometimes. Keep ’em to myself.
That’s why I wanner marry Bernie just as quick as I can. I gotta feelin’
way down inside that she’ll listen when she’s my wife, and help.”
He spoke the word wife with difficulty.
III
“I have always understood my children perfectly,” declared Anna Forge
years later, when the Forge domestic structure went down in wreckage, as
it was bound to go down in wreckage. “Edith would have been all right if
it hadn’t been for her brother’s example always before her. And Nathan,
he took after his father—bigoted, stubborn, cold-blooded, hard-hearted,
indifferent to those who have thanklessly tried to do their utmost to
help him.”
“I have always understood my children perfectly,” contended Johnathan
Forge to old Archibald Cuttner, when five years later Johnathan was
having a hysterical time to keep Nathan from marrying his granddaughter.
“Edith takes after her mother—fizzle-headed, irresponsible, neurotic,
always thinking of herself and her troubles, inconsistent, a woman in
every sense of the word. As for Nathan, God only knows who he takes
after. I’m almost ready to believe him sent to me as my cross. I trained
the boy by example and precept to walk uprightly, flee evil, honor and
respect his parents, worship God. But he is determined to go his own
way, regardless of my counsel. It’s partly the age in which we live
that’s to blame. Disrespect and profanation is in the very air the
rising generation breathes.”
“I am persuaded,” wrote a popular clergyman recently, “that what this
age needs more than all else is abstersion from the follies and
‘broad-mindedness’ of this blatant day; we need to return to the ‘good
old time,’ the fundamental things,—unconditional respect for parents,
rigorous observance of the Sabbath, the replacement of woman back in
the home where Nature intended her to function; less frivolous
nonsense and ‘isms’ in our educational systems and more
reading-writing-and-arithmetic, good, old-fashioned fear of fire and
brimstone thundered from our pulpits and a wholesome terror of the
wrath of God injected into the hearts of a shallow and mocking
generation who bow down and worship the Golden Calf.”
“I hope,” remarked Uncle Joe Fodder, the town philosopher, one night
when he and I discussed the Forges—“I hope the Lord’s got a sense o’
humor! How could He remain the Almighty without it?”
IV
The Forges, on coming to Paris, had taken a small gray cottage on Spring
Street. This cottage stood on a corner with a short width of yard
between the Adams Street sidewalk and the windows of the Forge dining
room. And on summer nights when the heat required opened windows,
neighbors and pedestrians overheard the full barrage of vocal artillery
that husband and wife laid down over trivial family matters or the scion
who was “bringing their gray hairs down in sorrow to the grave.”
From the day he was born until the day he married, the boy seemed a bone
of contention between his parents. For the most part these altercations
had to do with his mother’s animosity toward the father’s method of
raising his family. But always, when the man’s brutality got the better
of hysterical argument, the affair ended with the wife’s contention,
voiced in no very refined terms, that she “was going home to her
mother.”
I forget how many times Anna Forge “went home to her mother”, if I ever
knew. She threatened to do it a couple of times a week. About twice a
year she made the threat good. On these occasions she packed all her
personal clothes and possessions in several bags and telescope valises,
took a half day to “wash and iron the children”; called Uncle Joe
Fodder’s depot hack and “left her husband in style”, as Uncle Joe put
it.
She returned to a grass-widowed mother who lived in a small
manufacturing city out in York State. This mother sympathized with her
the first day; listened in silence to her troubles the second; was
indifferent to them the third; tolerated them the fourth; endured them
the fifth; “had words” with her daughter the sixth; quarreled with her
openly on the seventh and ordered her out of the house on the eighth.
Then back Anna Forge returned to John, entered her own home haughtily,
failed to speak to him until the third day, then started around the
six-month cycle all over.
These semiannual trips were gala days in the lives of Nathan and his
sister,—until he began to realize the tragedy that sponsored them.
One night he came running over to my house in great distress. He
“whistled me out” and I found him sobbing distraughtly.
“Pa an’ Ma have had an awful fight, Billy!” he told me. “Pa wouldn’t
give her no money for a dress to-day. But when he came home from
downtown he fetched one he’d bought himself. Ma looked at it and said
she wouldn’t be seen in the thing. Pa says she could wear it or go
naked. They got to havin’ words, Billy, and pretty soon Ma picked up the
butcher knife and says by the White Christ she’d cut Pa’s throat. And Pa
chucked a blue-glass pitcher at her all full o’ milk and said she was
full o’ high-flown Yankee notions and he’d take ’em out of her. Ma says
she’d go back to her mother and Pa says, ‘Yes, that’d be a good scheme,
only in a few days she’d have a fight with her mother and be right back
again.’ Then Ma says she’d chuck herself in the river. And Pa says she
didn’t have the guts, And Ma says oh, she didn’t have, did she, and
started right out of the house. She’s off toward the river now, Billy,
and I’m scared stiff she’ll do it.”
“You mean she’s went to commit suicide?” I demanded aghast.
“Yeah!—And her forehead was all bloody where the pitcher struck her.”
“How long’s she been gone?”
“She just started. I came right over. Pa sent me up to bed and I skipped
out over the woodshed roof.”
“Can she swim?”
“No! Anyhow, people that’s committing suicide don’t care whether they
can swim! Most of ’em don’t!”
“Gosh, she may really kill herself. Whatcher want me to do?”
“Come with me, Billy. Maybe we can stop her!”
We reached the river but found no woman. Nathan felt for a certainty his
mother had cast herself into the water and would not be consoled. He
knelt upon the close-cropped grass and with face on his hands he sobbed
distressingly.
“Why can’t I have a Pa and Ma that don’t fight all the time?” he cried
hysterically. “Other fellows do! Why can’t I? Oh, Ma! Ma! Ma!”
I tried to console him but I was rather ill myself. Somehow I felt
responsible for Mrs. Forge’s death, not having reached the stream in
time to intercept and dissuade her. My own face was awash with tears as
I tried to persuade my friend to go home and tell his dad.
“I climbed out on the shed roof and skun away,” cried Nathan. “I’m
scared stiff to go home again—ever! He’ll whale the daylights out o’ me
fer tellin’ anybody about it, even you!”
“We better go somewheres,” I argued. “We can’t save her now. And we
can’t stay out here all night. You better come home with me, and I’ll
tell my Ma and she’ll see what you better do. She ain’t afraid of your
Pa! She’ll tell him what she thinks of him. My Ma’s great at tellin’
your folks what she thinks of ’em!”
I persuaded Nat to come home with me. It was a tragic return.
My mother gathered us against her ample bosom, an arm about each of us,
while she listened to the horror of the thing we blurted out. Then she
smiled sadly and kissed us.
“Bless your hearts! Nathan’s mother has been here with me, telling me
about it,” mother said. “She must have turned back through Pine Street
while you were on the way to the river. She wouldn’t kill herself. She
loves Nathan too much to do that. She said so!”
V
Nathan’s mother went home that night and when she reentered the house,
John Forge looked up from his paper and said:
“Huh! Back, are you? I thought so!”
The mother passed up to bed with some hot retort about “her life
belonging to her children”.
But she cried all that night and John Forge slept on the downstairs
sofa.
“I heard him say it was a hell of a home,” Nathan told me afterward.
VI
Outside of parental incompatibility, the other bane of Nat’s life in
those years was the manner in which his father compelled him to dress. A
high-strung, sensitive lad, naturally fastidious, he could not have
suffered a worse handicap in the matter of polish and poise in later
years than resulted from Johnathan’s policy of dressing his family.
The boy was the butt of the school for his oddities of raiment.
Johnathan’s idea of clothing was merely something to cover primeval
nakedness. The first new suit the boy possessed he purchased with money
he had made running errands. Invariably he wore coats and trousers cut
down from those his father had discarded. This would not have been so
bad if his mother had been any sort of tailoress. But she was slovenly
with needle and scissors and the jests of his school companions were
Chinese cruelty. “The Scarecrow” they called him.
Openly he was twitted that he was not invited to parties because of his
freakish appearance. Johnathan Forge was small in stature and at
seventeen Nathan was almost of a size with his father. After that the
lad was compelled to wear Johnathan’s suits without remodeling. When
Johnathan thus relegated a cast-off suit to his son, while he bought
himself a new one, he made the boy pay something from his savings,
whether he wanted to purchase the clothes or not. John’s philosophy was
“making a man of Nat” and “teaching him to take care of his clothes
because they cost money.” But it took years of hard, deliberate
self-training to make Nat forego a painful self-consciousness of clothes
and personal appearance.
Often in prayer meeting, which Nathan was forced to attend religiously
after fourteen, as I listened to John Forge giving intimate details of
the spiritual partnership between himself and the Savior, I heard Nathan
snarl under his breath:
“Then I wish Jesus would put it into his head to get me a new pair o’
pants! I hope the Lord goes around lookin’ decent in His clothes but I
doubt it or He’d have some pity on me!”
VII
Outside of school, our lives were tied up intimately with the Methodist
Church. We had no movies or theaters to speak of in those days, few
sports, certainly no parties or dances,—at least for Nathan. The only
party he ever attended, with parental sanction, up to the time of his
majority, was little Bernice-Theresa’s of previous record and that
largely because it fell within the scope of a school affair.
We went to church morning and evening on Sunday and to Junior League at
four o’clock. We went to Tuesday-night class meeting and were scared
nearly out of our wits at being called to stand up and testify how much
we loved God when we didn’t know whether we loved Him or not. And on
Thursday nights we sat through those long, distressing silences between
testimonies when forty people waited for the spirit to move the brethren
and lips whispered silently, committing sentiments to memory which were
uttered parrot-like once the whisperers were on their feet. We knew
before we started in who was going to pray the longest and for what he
was going to pray; who was going to sing the loudest and what he was
going to “call for” in the matter of hymns; who was going to testify the
hardest and what his remarks were going to include. My only comment on
these weekly spiritual gatherings, in so far as two growing boys were
made to attend under pressure, was that they did us no lasting harm.
The red-letter days in our lives, however, were the Friday-night
“sociables” and bean suppers, or the concerts given for Easter, Harvest
and Christmas.
Absolutely forbidden company or contact with the other sex by narrow
parental decree, the boy Nathan, being a normal, healthy youngster, had
either to repress natural maturing emotions until they found outlet in
clandestine, perverted channels, or he had to gain worldly knowledge and
sex-poise by the hard, raw route of searing experience when John was no
longer able to make his decree effective.
John Forge’s argument was that sex, as well as money, being a basic root
of all human evil, the way to keep a boy from disaster was to prohibit
him the company of sex altogether.
John Forge had married unhappily, therefore all marriages were unhappy.
Nat should not duplicate his father’s mistake if John had to kill him to
save him from it.
If Nathan attended any school or neighborhood gathering and his father
heard of it afterward, the man had two questions ready for his son: (1)
“Were there any girls present?” and (2) “Did you kiss ’em?”
John Forge had a crazed obsession about his boy kissing a girl.
In the school yard and even at church “sociables” we often played
asinine childish games, “Ring Around the Rosy”, “Copenhagen” and “Drop
the Pillow.” But Nathan, fearing his father’s wrath, was ever the
wallflower. And he was deeply in love with Bernice-Theresa, or thought
he was. Other boys kissed their “girls.” Why shouldn’t he?
“I’ve got to kiss her! I’ve just simply got to kiss her!” he
consequently affirmed to me; no emperor ever planned the ravishing of a
rival kingdom with the sangfroid with which Nathan deliberated upon the
necessity for osculatory assault on the Dresden Doll.
“The thing to do,” I advised gravely, “is to get her alone where she
can’t scream or bring help. And it’s got to be done in such a way that
she don’t tell her folks! Because then they’ll tell your folks and your
dad will just simply kill you!”
This might seem impossible, but to fourteen nothing is impossible.
We thought of intriguing Bernice into the woods at the edge of town,
into the haunted dwelling next to the tannery, into all sorts of lonely,
lugubrious places. But the difficulty lay in enticing her to the
rendezvous and operating on her rosebud lips without scaring the Dresden
Doll half out of her senses and bringing a boomerang back upon
ourselves. Ultimately we resolved upon a bold maneuver: _We would kiss
Bernice Gridley in church_!
“We could send her and Elinore a note,” I planned, “asking ’em to wait
after the Easter concert. I could keep Elinore and send Bernie out into
the vestibule. Just as she comes through the door you could grab her and
do it! Then run like the devil!”
This was bold. It was terribly bold! Yet it was feasible. We had yet to
learn that the ecstasy of osculation consists largely in the warmth and
passion of reciprocity. We were midget cavemen, Nathan and I.
Bernice-Theresa had to be kissed if our lives were forfeit.
I blush now when I consider the terms of endearment in which our letters
of those days were penned. Hours we spent writing them. The most
indiscreet scion of Pittsburgh aristocracy never committed himself more
idiotically (to repent subsequently in curses and coin) than Nathan and
I described our holiest, hottest feelings for the edification of those
little snobs. So the intriguing epistles were indited and delivered. The
kissing of Bernice-Theresa was on!
Nathan and I sensed little of that concert. We were too much occupied
visioning the epochal thing to ensue as its aftermath.
The concert began, ran its course and ended. And the Dresden Doll never
appeared more bewitching than she did upon that platform. Two small boys
caught each other’s eyes and wiped perspiration from youthful brows. The
fatal day and hour had come. Did we have the nerve to go through with
it? Only the fear of each thinking the other cowardly held us from
fleeing that church when the organist began the postlude.
It had been a beautiful spring afternoon and during the concert a
thunderstorm played above the village. But later the sun broke through
upon a sweet and dripping world, and the weather gave our elders no
cause to tarry. The two girls, silly and giggling, held converse with
other little girls up near the altar rail. They had signified by signs
and semaphoring to which grown folk have no code-book, that they would
wait and consider the momentous things we had to propound. And the
church continued to empty and the janitor to close the windows.
Nathan and I stood waiting in the vestry. It was shadowed out there. I
occupied a doorway at one side. I saw the two little girls finally
coming down the center aisle, and made a sign to Nat. He nodded. His
limbs were turning to tallow; he was hoping he would not faint at the
peak of the conspiracy when nerve alone was required to see it through.
At the next to the last pew the two girls parted. Elinore sidled off
between the seats to make her way to my door. Bernie kept on and stepped
into the vestry.
The instant she appeared, all the pent-up intrigue of weeks galvanized
in Nathan.
I am not certain where he kissed her, but at the shock of a small boy
hurtling himself dramatically from the shadows, the Dresden Doll
recoiled and shrieked and wilted.
Nathan exploded his kiss, trusting it to hit its mark. He sensed much
talcum powder and cologne in his nostrils, contact with adolescent
flesh, sweet and soft and warm. Then, at the instant of glorious
success, the wrath of God broke from the heavens and consumed him as the
fire that blasted Sodom. From the skies above, from the earth, from the
waters beneath the earth, from somewhere came a Voice, a terrible,
blasting, annihilating Voice:
“Here! Here! Here! What the devil’s comin’ off here, anyhow?”
Nat snapped up into the air. Then he assumed a Direction. Luckily the
open church door was ahead. Into the soft spring dusk he shot and began
to tread the world beneath him crazily. His not to reason why, his but
to flee or die; Nathan cleared the doorstep into thin air and zoomed for
the horizon. I was close behind him.
We negotiated the walk, the curb and the street. We made the opposite
walk and kept on going. We went through Pat Larkin’s side yard and Mrs.
Larkin’s choicest roses. A lot of sweet-pea vines came next, with most
of them trailing behind us. Nat stepped on a cucumber frame and I plowed
through a couple of yards of hen wire. Thereupon we got through the
Alderman property into Adams Street. But we did not stop there.
We went through Adams Street, through Pine and Walnut. Then out of town
by the pumping station. We covered two miles that night before we
finally plunged into Bancroft’s Woods far down the river. There we
crawled into the underbrush and squatted on our haunches.
Said Nathan, “Who was it?”
Said I, “It was Mr. Gridley!”
Sickening silence!
“Where’d he come from?” Nathan finally found strength to ask.
“He came down the belfry stairs! I remember now there was something the
matter with the bell-rope this morning. He must have gone up with John
Chase to fix it.”
“Her father!” groaned Nathan. “Billy—this is the end!”
“Not on your tintype it ain’t! It’s only the beginning!” I retorted.
“Billy—what are we going to do?”
So Guy Fawkes must have queried his lieutenants when the well-known
Gunpowder Plot went slightly awry.
“I dunno, Nathan. It’s a cinch we can’t go home! We can’t ever go home
again!”
“That’s right,” agreed Nathan. “Maybe Mr. Gridley is at my house right
this minute, tellin’ it all to dad!”
“It looks, Nathan, as if we’d have to leave this place for good and all.
Have you got any money?”
“Twenty cents,” said my friend, totaling his pockets.
“I’ve got a dollar-seventy in my bank at home, if I could sneak in and
get it out.”
“That’d be a dollar-ninety. We could live a long time on a
dollar-ninety.”
“Where’d we go?” I asked.
“West, I guess. Everybody goes west. Nap Taro went west and come back
rich. Maybe down the future years, if we could come back rich, they’d
forgive us.”
“But how’d we get there? It costs more’n a dollar-ninety to get west.
And we gotta eat in the meantime.”
“We’d have to hop freight trains like the tramps. It’s a cinch we gotta
get outa here or the police’ll catch us.”
“Oh, dear, I wisht we hadn’t done it!” I groaned.
“So do I,” lamented Nathan feverishly. “But it’s done now and can’t be
undone.”
“That’s right. I don’t know as I ever heard of anybody unkissing a girl.
And we won’t be able to grow up and marry Elinore and Bernie at all——”
“Maybe if we wrote a letter to ’em after we got west, they’d wait for
us. Women do that sort of thing sometimes—till death.”
“But they’re probably mad at us by now.”
Nathan laid over on the rain-wet grass and hid his face in his hands.
After a time he sat up and asked as men ask after drifting for weeks on
an open sea:
“Billy, do you suppose it would do any good to pray?”
I considered this.
“Yes,” I said devoutly, relievedly; “let’s pray about it!”
“Who’ll pray, Billy, you or me? You pray!”
“No—you!” I argued. “You did the kissin’!”
“All right,” said Nathan brokenly. “But what’ll I say?”
“I’d ask God first to forgive the sin of it. Then I’d beseech Him to
show us a way out—because we’re sorry—terribly sorry—and a way out is
what we need most.”
Again Nathan considered, ashen-faced, biting his nails until the blood
came. Then two distraught boys, hatless, their clothing bedaubed and
briar-torn, facing the most hideous dilemma thus far in their lives,
knelt in the shower-washed alders. Earnestly they besought aid from the
giver of every good and perfect gift.
“Oh, God,” prayed Nathan, “we have sinned—we have sinned—against heaven
and against Thee. Lord, we have kissed—we have kissed—no, _I_ have
kissed—a g-g-girl—and her father, Mr. Caleb M. Gridley, who runs the
tannery here in Paris—he caught us!”
Nathan paused. He was very near sobbing. His voice broke several times
in attempts to continue, striving to remember orthodox forms of divine
supplication which might be appropriate for the present situation.
“He—he—he caught us, oh, God!” went on Nathan. “Oh, God, we beseech
Thee—we beseech Thee—not to wreak Thy anger upon us, nor visit us with
Thy displeasure—displeasure. Hear our prayers, we pray Thee—we pray
Thee—and have compassion upon us—upon us. Mr. C. M. Gridley is mad at my
father anyhow, over a suit for some leather that ain’t never been
settled up, and now that he knows I’ve kissed his daughter, he’ll
probably get action on collection. Mr. John H. Forge, my father, will
wreck his displeasure on me, his son. Oh, God, we didn’t mean to do it,
God,—that is, we meant to do it but didn’t mean to get caught. Therefore
shield and protect us in Thy infinite mercy, oh, God, and turn not Thine
ear from us—Thine ear from us. Lead us not into temptation but deliver
us from evil; for Thine is the power and the glory forever. Amen!”
Nathan turned quickly, anxiously.
“Did I say enough?” he demanded. “I suppose I might have laid it on
stronger.”
I held some such idea, but it was unethical and inappropriate now to
return and reopen the prayer. I said God was assumed to know everything
and inferred that undoubtedly He realized the exigency of the present
circumstances anyhow.
“What’ll we do now?” Nathan next asked. “Had we better go west?”
“No,” I finally decided. “Let’s wait and see how the prayer takes hold.
The Bible says ‘Knock and ye shall find; seek and it shall be opened
unto you’. I say we trust Him.”
“You mean go home?”
“Well, we can sort of sneak up and see what’s happened. And if the
prayer don’t do nothin’ then we can think about going west afterward.”
This possessed sound points and as the stars were coming out and the
frogs were piping shrilly in the boglands, we arrived by back roads and
streets at the Forge cottage.
“Pa and Ma are at it again!” groaned Nat in a sick whisper. “Probably
old Gridley’s been here and told’ em. Listen!”
I heard epithets applied to a woman which made my mother’s face whiten
when I suggested them at bedtime.
“Nat and I heard ’em through the kitchen window,” I declared. “We was
lyin’ underneath it, listenin.”
“Well, sonny, don’t you ever remember those words or think of them
again. They mean horrible, vile, foul, wicked things. That’s all I can
tell you that you can understand—now!”
“But Nathan’s father said ’em!”
“Then Nathan’s father is a wicked man, even if he does get up in prayer
meeting and tell how precious the Lord is to his soul. And did Nathan
get into the house?”
“Yeah, he sneaked up to bed the front way. The door was open.”
“Well, you see, dear, your prayer was answered, wasn’t it?”
“It looks so, Ma!”
“Always remember it, laddie. You’re going to get in tighter situations
than you got into to-night. Don’t ever be ashamed to pray, laddie. It
never harms and always helps.”
“Do you think God really heard it, Ma?”
“Your prayer was answered, wasn’t it, laddie?”
“Yeah, Ma!”
“Then isn’t that answer enough? What more need mother say?”
It developed that Mr. Gridley had not recognized the identity of his
daughter’s demonstrative friend. In fact, he had forgotten the incident
within ten seconds after Nathan had taken unto himself wings and flown.
He was far more interested in finding a short ladder to fix that
bell-rope.
Thus for the first time in a great vicissitude Nathan and I learned that
the worst enemy a man can have is often his own imagination.
VIII
The battle royal between Nathan’s father and mother had been caused by
something of graver import to my friend than any mere family adjustment
between Forge and Gridley over osculatory assault upon a little girl. It
had been caused by a decision voiced earlier that Sunday evening by
Johnathan that he was determined to take Nat from school and put him to
work.
Nathan was now past fourteen and legally entitled to his “papers” and
educational “freedom.” John had been compelled to work ten hours a day
at fourteen, turning his money over to his father. Nathan should do the
same. And Mrs. Forge had objected, not so much for Nathan’s sake, as
because it was Johnathan’s proposition.
Old Caleb Gridley, although holding a seventy-dollar court judgment over
Johnathan, had never been able to collect his money. He had made John’s
life a burden. So John had it in mind to suggest that Nathan be given a
job in the tannery and work out his father’s debt.
Nathan, conceded the smartest boy who attended the Academy, was
ultimately set to work at four dollars a week. Johnathan bought his
peace with his conscience by generously returning his son twenty-five
cents a week to be “squandered” in any way the boy chose.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER IX
BENDING THE TWIG
I
The girl Madelaine had been within three weeks of her eleventh birthday
when Mrs. Theddon adopted her from the Corpus-Christi Orphanage.
If the child were precocious in a queer, matronly way, her clouded
parentage and life at the Home were mainly responsible. She was
intensely feminine and affectionate, fiercely maternal, all of which at
first made for a certain distress when thrust out into the coëducational
environment of the Springfield public schools with children of equal
age.
Like some unmarried women, Mrs. Theddon was full of theories as to how a
child should be reared. Yet the woman was neither bigoted nor maudlin.
She had brains and common sense. If she held theories on child culture
and child psychology, it was because she had evolved them from a
shrewdness of observation when in contact with the offspring of affluent
parents with whom she associated. There was no “private school nonsense”
for her child therefore, until Madelaine was old enough to know the
meaning and worth of exclusiveness. Beside, for a few years, Gracia
Theddon wanted the little girl about her home and private tutors could
never supply that academic atmosphere and class _camaraderie_ which
should be made chief among the heritages of adolescence.
So Madelaine went to the Forest Park school, and while the locality and
its offspring were above normal, she stood out in her classes like an
orchid in a thistle bed. She did careful, neat, thorough work and made
friends. But she had no giggly age. No boys wrote asinine notes to her
or tried to flirt with her. She shrank from participation in adolescent
pranks.
At home she quickly absorbed the atmosphere of the Theddon household.
She became an avid reader of everything in the big Theddon library. For
hours at a time she lay stretched face downward along the window seat in
the southeast corner of that splendid room, absorbed in the classics.
And three years passed like white magic.
During her term in the ninth grade Madelaine grew perceptibly. It was an
awkward time but never wholly distressing. At fifteen she was almost as
tall as her foster-mother. Then she began to grow willowy, lithe and
graceful.
She had few companions even then, and did not seem to cultivate them.
“Honestly, I wish the child would laugh once in a while,” Mrs. Theddon
told a friend, calling one afternoon. “But somehow it doesn’t occur to
her to laugh. She acts as if the world were too big, wonderful and
mystic to contain such a thing as humor.”
“Then you’re satisfied with her?” the caller suggested.
“Satisfied? My dear woman, there are times when I’m afraid I’ll be
unable to satisfy her! That sounds strange, doesn’t it? But the girl’s
faith in every one and everything is so absolute and her ideals so
quaint that I almost fear to have her grow further. I try to tell her,
to pave the way for disillusion, but I don’t seem to get results. She
looks at me so hurt and incredulous that I feel as though I were
defiling Eden.”
This incredulity of Madelaine’s worried her mother far more than the
latter cared to admit. Likewise the girl’s instinctive estheticism and
reserve. One summer evening, as they strolled the length of Sumner
Avenue, Mrs. Theddon expounded her philosophy of life for the first time
aggressively, to her daughter.
“Madelaine, dear,” she declared, “I want you to think of this world and
look upon life as a long, long, series of interesting and constructive
experiences. All of them may not be pleasant. But always they must be
constructive. Whether you make them interesting depends entirely upon
yourself, your capacity for participation in them.”
“Participation!” repeated the girl. “What do you mean by participation?”
“I mean plunging in and enjoying them for all they’re worth, taking part
in everything—your own accorded part—to the utmost, regardless of how
small that part may be. Don’t shrink from anything. Never be that most
distressing and unfinished product—a “wallflower” or spectator. Plunge
in—taste, feel, enjoy, laugh and love. Be in the center of things, never
on the edge. Of course, I don’t meant perverted things, activities or
pursuits that offend decency or violate self-respect. And there is never
excuse for stirring a sewer, in order to prove it’s foul.”
“I understand, mother dear.”
“What I want to impress upon you, and the greatest heritage a parent can
pass on to any child, is this: It’s _your_ world, yours to enjoy, yours
to live in, play in, work in, get the most from. Every healthy activity
exists to be experienced and not to be watched while others experience.
Every social accomplishment, every art, every science, every hobby, has
come about and is enjoyed because normal, healthy people in the past
have found pleasure, enjoyment and improvement in them. If they have
done so—you may likewise. Life has been given to you to get your
portion. But Life can’t seize you by the shoulders and drag you in. You
must go in for yourself. The deepest wrong I can conceive a grown person
doing to a younger is implanting within his or her subconscious mind
that horrible ‘You mustn’t!’ It’s the blackest handicap a child can
acquire. My creed is ‘Do!’ Never doubt yourself. Never believe you’re
any different from any girl or woman who has ever lived on earth.
Because you’re not. Yet you’re not commonplace, either! The greatest
self-crime is self-depreciation. Remember that all people believe in you
unless you doubt yourself. They take you not at somebody else’s
appraisal but solely at the estimate you place upon yourself. Timid
people are only those with half-developed souls. I don’t mean by not
being timid that you should be noisy or obstreperous. A child’s home
influences should curb or counteract hoydenism. But hold up your head,
be positive, never fear to look at life courageously, to see it clearly
and see it whole. The world is yours, my dear, and all the men and women
in it—for your enjoyment and boon companions.”
“You make me afraid when you talk to me like that—and yet you make me
glad!” the girl responded wonderingly.
“I’ve learned it by bitter experience, dear—my philosophy. I’ve told you
something of my story: how I started life a poor girl in a village up in
Vermont. My father and mother were never able to see beyond the village
sky line. Life and the outside world terrified them. Forever they were
telling me ‘You can’t!’ Doubting themselves, of course they doubted
their daughter. From ‘You can’t!’ it was a step to ‘You mustn’t!’ I
loved a man at eighteen as dearly as I ever loved anybody. He was a
smart young man, with many excellent qualities. In those days he was
considered so smart I doubted that I could be his wife. It sounds
strange. But I did. I thought he needed a cleverer woman than myself to
be that wife successfully. I told him so. It broke his heart. Then my
father and mother died suddenly—within a year of each other. I had to
make my way alone; earn my living. I went to Boston. Always I found
myself a wallflower, a spectator, while others played and enjoyed. I
wanted to play and enjoy also. But I’d been taught to believe that ‘nice
girls’ didn’t do anything but sit and fold their hands. Then, praise
God, a man came and took me up into an exceeding high mountain.”
“Captain Theddon?”
“No. Not Captain Theddon! He was a man from Virginia. He loved me
dearly. For a year I was almost too happy to move. It seemed the world
about me was made of frail glass—pink glass. If I moved it would crash.
This man took me in hand, I say. In a year he undid most of my vicious
training. He opened a new heaven and a new earth by getting me to accept
exactly what I told you a moment ago—to be a participant in everything
instead of a spectator. He taught me the simple truth that shyness is
only the fear of ridicule—but that people who ridicule are either
deficient themselves or coarsely conceited. Therefore they are not
deserving of attention at all. And under his tutelage, for two short
years I was deliriously happy!”
“Why didn’t you marry him, mother dear?”
“He had to go to California—because of tuberculosis. He died out there.”
The girl was shocked. Then she observed softly:
“I should have thought it would have broken you too, mother dear.”
“It would have broken me, Madelaine, if Hugh hadn’t taught me, along
with the rest, to consider every experience that came to me as sent for
some grand and constructive purpose. I think he knew he was going to die
before he left me. Just a few moments before he boarded his train he
said, ‘The greatest experience of your life, dear girl, lies just ahead.
If you fail to apply it constructively, you’re not worthy of it at all.’
Poor me! I thought he meant our marriage if he recovered. He meant his
own death—my loss of him. It came to me—his last message—after he was
only a memory. It was hard to see anything constructive in that horrible
disappointment. But I did. I plunged into life, making it give me
something to outweigh my grief. I don’t mean I became frivolous—I simply
refused to be morbid—for Hugh’s sake at first—then for the sake of Life
itself. I saw that my loss had been sent to deepen my life, to make me
sensitive to others who had suffered. I found out how richly one may
live, whether it be in sunshine or in mist. And that philosophy now I
want to pass along to you. To live, dear girl, just to live—for its own
sweet sake—is a blessed, blessed privilege. But alas, so few know how to
live. They go on the ‘I mustn’t’ policy, never stopping to reason out
why. They merely _exist_—even in the simplest of life’s rôles. And I
don’t want you to merely exist, Madelaine. I want you to get from
beautiful Life every last fleck of sunshine and shadow. There’s no
sorrow that can come to you, dear, that you can’t make beautiful.
There’s no joy or happiness that you can’t make injurious and vicious.
Never mind what your rôle in life is to be, dear, whether you become a
great artist or the unsung wife of an unsung man, whatever your hands
find to do, don’t only ‘do it with all your might’ but find some way to
make it interesting. A sod hut on a prairie can be made as interesting
as a gallery of Italian art—if you only look at it in the right light,
making the utmost of yourself and materials. But to do that, you must be
a part of those materials yourself—always a participant, sure of
yourself, positive, constructive, analytical, intense, living each day
to every one of the eighty-six thousand, four hundred seconds it
contains.”
Gracia Theddon not only preached this sort of thing; she lived it—every
one of the day’s eighty-six thousand, four hundred seconds—herself. Her
home, her social life, her dress, her face,—she had paid a price for
everything that she was and owned. And having paid the price, she saw
that she had her “Value Received.”
II
During these years, Madelaine had met very few of Gracia Theddon’s
relatives. But the July after her graduation from grammar school, young
Gordon Ruggles, son of Captain Theddon’s sister, alighted from the
Albany train, gave a red-cap a half-dollar to carry his portmanteau two
hundred feet, had a taxi convey him where a street car would have served
at one-twentieth the expense and entered his aunt’s home without ringing
the bell.
Young Ruggles was past sixteen, hard as nails, tough as a young owl and
twice as wise, could lick his weight in wounded wildcats and circle the
globe alone. One front tooth grew over another on his upper jaw, and he
had a vicious right eye. When he wanted a thing, he went and took it. If
his father didn’t care to pay the bill, the bill simply went unpaid.
Most spoiled rich boys are weaklings and cowards. Gordon loved a fight
as a girl loves silk.
Through the Theddon household he went therefore, opening doors and
slamming them, throwing his cap on a table so carelessly it toppled and
smashed a fancy vase, mounting the stairs with a curse and banging into
his aunt’s room like a motion-picture villain looking for the escaped
heroine.
On the north side of his aunt’s chamber he beheld the door into the
maid’s room,—at least it had been the maid’s room when last he had
visited the house. Gordon crossed over, yanked open the door, thrust in
his head and shoulders and cried hoarsely:
“Suffering Arabella!”
Facing him was a girl at her toilet—twelve, fourteen, sixteen years—how
old was she? Like a startled fawn, rigid with alarm, she backed against
the foot of her bed and stopped the young Goth with her eyes.
Frock and pumps had yet to be negotiated. The former she caught up now
and crumpled against her alabaster throat. So held, it only reached her
knees. Her perfect legs were classic in silken hosiery, so slender it
appeared a mystery how those ankles supported the weight.
It was her head and her face, however, that had halted the intruder so
abruptly. Her dark hair fluffed back from her forehead in a wavy
pompadour. It was gathered with a small jeweled barrette at the back and
long curls fell over an undraped shoulder, only accentuating the
perfection of flesh. Her eyes blazed with the indignity of this
intrusion. Her nostrils quivered.
“Gawd, what a filly!” was all the young worldly wiseman could
articulate.
“Who are you? And how dare you come in here now?”
“And who are you?” returned Gordon.
“I’m Madelaine Theddon—Mrs. Theddon’s daughter!”
The lid of the boy’s bad eye flopped twice.
“You’re who?” he cried, amazed.
“I’m Mrs. Theddon’s daughter, I told you——”
“Tell that to the Marines! Aunt Gracia hasn’t got a daughter. Unless——”
Being naturally low-minded, the alternative occurred to him promptly.
“But I am, I tell you! She adopted me—four years ago. And please go out
till I’m dressed.”
Gordon laughed coarsely and licked his lips.
“Adopted you, did she? That’s a good one. She never told us about it.”
“That’s her business, isn’t it? I don’t know as there was any reason why
she was required to do so, whoever you are. But if you possess any
traits of a gentleman you’ll leave my room until I’m dressed.”
“Oh, don’t be catty. I’m her nephew, Gord, and you aren’t the first dame
I’ve ever seen half-dressed.”
“I might gather as much from your conduct!”
“Been knocking me, has she? Well, just for that, I’ll get out when I
please.”
“I shall call the servants!”
“Go ahead; I can lick any darned fathead Aunt Gracia’s got around here.
But I hope you have better luck than I did. I hunted all over the
place.”
The girl was close to tears. She looked around desperately. Then with a
flash of white she was gone—into the bathroom. The intervening door was
fastened swiftly.
“A peach!” whistled the boy. He moved back into the larger chamber. “Now
I wonder where did Gracia pick her up? She’s a pippin! A dream! A
cuckoo! A lulu—_Whew!_”
III
Gracia Theddon came into the room,—trailed in, a long string of jade
beads clicking against her knees. She stopped.
“Where did you come from?” she blazed.
“Johnsville! They kicked me out!”
“You mean you’ve been expelled?”
“Call it that if you want.”
“What for?”
“Oh, a bunch of us took Dutch leave one night and the girl that was with
us squealed. They said I was responsible.”
“Which you probably were!”
“Well, what of it? They kicked me out, anyhow. I might as well be blamed
as not.”
“But why have you come here?”
“Haven’t got any other place to go, have I?—with the mater and governor
across.”
“Meaning you’ve spent all your money?”
“I guess so.”
“Take your feet off that polished chair! What do you think I’m going to
do about it?”
“Make me financial once more——or lemme stay here till the governor gets
back. I’d just as soon stay,” he grinned with a glance at Madelaine’s
door.
“Oh, you had? Well, I’d as soon you had not!”
“Yeah—on account of what you got in the bathroom, what?”
“You unspeakable young vulgarian! How do you know——”
“Oh, I busted in there, looking for your maid. But you don’t need to be
sore! She’s all right, leave it to me! Great taste you got, Aunt Grace.
I couldn’t ‘a’ picked a prettier one myself!”
If Gracia Theddon had been less a lady she would have flown into a rage.
Instead she returned calmly:
“Young man, your insinuations are an insult. And whether Madelaine
happens to be here or not, I don’t want you around my house.”
“All right, give me some kale and I’ll blow.”
“I’ll give you nothing.”
“But look it, Aunt Gracia, I’ve got to have a place to sleep and eat,
haven’t I? And the governor’ll be sore if he comes back and knows I
asked you for dough and you gave me the icy stare.”
Biting her lip, the woman trailed across the room and stood by the
window, looking out. After all, the boy’s father would reimburse her and
it was better than having him remain under the same roof with Madelaine.
“How much do you want?” she demanded.
“Oh, a thousand will do! Till I need more.” And the youngster laughed.
“A thousand dollars! Are you crazy?”
“No, but if I set the figure lower you’d fork it across. And I’d rather
stick around.”
Gracia sat down at her desk, wrote a check and ripped it from the check
book.
“Now get out!” she ordered.
The boy’s bad eyelid flopped again.
“Until it’s gone, Aunt Grace,” he chaffed. “Happy days!”
“If I had my way, young man, you’d land in reform school. Get out!”
Gracia Theddon whirled, however, at sound of a voice from the door.
“You’re not sending him away on my account, are you, mother dear? I’m
sure he didn’t mean anything. He couldn’t find you and was looking for
the maid. And besides, I should have locked my door.”
“You should have done nothing of the sort,” Mrs. Theddon replied
angrily. “He had no right to enter a girl’s room——”
“Introduce us, Aunt Grace. I thought I’d met the family.”
Gracia Theddon waged a quick battle with her temper.
She introduced the two,—stiffly.
“I’m sorry I was rude,” the boy said awkwardly a moment later. “But, you
see, everybody goes on the idea that I’m a roughneck and a low-brow and
I—I—well, I’ve got to live up to my reputation.” He shot a challenge at
his aunt.
“I won’t think you a roughneck or low-brow—whatever those things mean,”
Madelaine returned. “And I’m sure we can be friends. You’re not sending
him away, mother dear, before I’ve even a chance to get acquainted with
the only cousin I have?”
“He’s not your cousin——” Gracia began angrily. She meant to infer that
Gordon and Madelaine had nothing in common in the matter of breeding or
character. If she had not paused, she could have covered the break and
it might not have been noticed. But she did pause and the Fairy
Foundling flamed scarlet. For it taunted her with the old, old ache that
after all she was a nobody, living on the Theddon generosity—a child
from an orphanage—or one who had been bought like a pretty slave for a
thousand dollars to ameliorate an affluent woman’s loneliness.
“Then we’ll try to play the game that we are cousins,” Madelaine
contended. “I’m sure you’ve been mistaken about Gordon. It isn’t fair to
believe people are some things until there’s nothing left for them to do
but become those things—is it?”
Gordon and his aunt both sensed the defense in the girl’s argument.
Gordon thought he had won in spite of his aunt, already. The girl’s fine
grain was lost on him entirely. But not on the woman. She felt that the
Fairy Foundling would champion and mother the most foul-souled criminal
that ever drew breath. It was her heritage and her danger.
“Gordon,” the woman propounded in an iron voice, “my daughter is of
different caliber than the girls you’ve been meeting, whether you’ve
been in military school or not. So you keep in mind that you’re a young
gentleman or—or—God help you!”
The boy pulled a daffodil from a near-by bowl and tore it to pieces
angrily.
“I guess I know class when I see it,” he grumbled.
This was so raw and rude that even Madelaine paled. But she recovered
herself and laughed.
“You know what I said about some of the children when they first came to
the Home, mother dear? Well—let’s all try—to get—better acquainted.”
IV
At five o’clock the following afternoon, while Madelaine was dressing
for dinner, Gracia entered her room and passed through to her
daughter’s. She dismissed the maid and closed the door.
“I’ve just had an answer to my cable,” she announced. “Amos and Margaret
are not coming back until spring. Amos is asking as a special favor that
I keep Gordon here and look after him until he gets back and can deal
with him.”
“But what of that, mother? I’m sure——”
“I’m sure that young barbarian will succeed in ingratiating himself into
your sympathies, Madelaine. Make you believe he’s not the thing he
emphatically is. I can’t very well deny Margaret’s boy the shelter of my
home. But I can and shall deny him propinquity with my daughter.
Madelaine, please take it kindly and believe it hurts me far more than
it does yourself. But I’m going to send you away—to school.”
It was the girl’s turn to struggle with self for a moment. Then in even
voice she replied quietly:
“Of course, I’ll do whatever pleases you, mother dear. For after all,
you know, I’m indebted to you more than I can ever repay.”
Mrs. Theddon uttered a little cry.
“No, no! Madelaine! Don’t take it that way! You’re not a helpless
mercenary—you weren’t bought——”
She stopped. The misery on the girl’s face was unmistakable.
“Wasn’t I, mother dear? I thought I was—for a thousand dollars——”
“Madelaine! How did you know? Who told you——?”
“I happened to be hiding, unintentionally, in Miss Howland’s office that
day. I heard everything. And there’s not been one day since, when I’ve
heard you tear a check from your check book, but what I’ve remembered
why and how I’m—here! Why did you do it? Oh, mother dear? Why did you?”
“My God!” cried the woman. “Madelaine, I never dreamed you knew! Or if
you did, I thought you too little for it to make any difference.
Sometimes I’ve wondered if you’re not really a woman even older and
wiser than myself—merely using a young girl’s body.”
“Why did you, mother dear? You really didn’t have to do it!”
“And has that been bothering you, dear?”
“Ever since the day I came!”
The woman’s face and posture remained wooden for a moment. Then she
relaxed.
“You poor dear, parentless lamb! Don’t you know—don’t you
understand—can’t you see why? I did it because of my love!”
“Your love!”
“Exactly. Maybe I’ve been trained and molded these last few years,
Madelaine, to think of value as money. I can’t help that. A thousand
people would have termed my payment to the Howland woman absurd and
ridiculous. Of course it was. And yet I had a purpose in it. Dear
heart—I wanted to feel you had cost me something. Something I had paid
for so I had the right to bona fide ownership!”
The girl’s calm eyes searched the woman’s face. They read the truth.
“Cost you something?” she exclaimed.
“I couldn’t go through the pain of giving you birth, dear girl. Yet I
felt myself cheapening you and cheapening myself to get you for nothing.
I wanted to pay—pay something ridiculous—and I did!” The woman’s voice
cracked. “It wasn’t the Howland person getting money to which she had no
right—it was my parting with it that counted! Can’t you understand?”
“You might have given it to the Orphanage, instead of Miss Howland who
really didn’t——”
“Child, child! You’ll never know how much I have given to the Orphanage
since you arrived to make my life worth while!”
V
“Mother,” said the girl after a time, “tell me why you really want me to
go away? Why is it you don’t want me around where Gordon is? What’s the
matter with him?”
“I said he was a ‘rotter.’ That’s enough!”
“But what do you mean by a ‘rotter’? What especially could he do by just
remaining here?”
Gracia Theddon bit her lip.
“Don’t you know how a bad boy could compromise a girl or woman if he
took it into his head to do it?”
“Compromise her? Just what do you mean?”
Mrs. Theddon stood looking out of the window for a time.
“Sit down, Madge,” she directed, after decision showed grimly on her
strong face. “I’m going to tell you a lot of things I wish that my
mother had told me, even when I was as young as yourself.”
The room grew dark as they sat there. The girl had drawn a chair to the
window and as the mother finished, she remained for a long time with her
elbows on the sill, her hands cupped about her face, staring down at the
river and the serried lights across the South End Bridge.
“I’m glad you’ve told me,” she said at last. “I’ve always wanted to know
but never dared ask.”
Gracia Theddon arose and snapped on the lights.
VI
A week later Gordon Ruggles accosted his aunt in the garden.
“Look here, Aunt Gracie, what have you done with our little Bird of
Paradise?” he demanded angrily.
“Bird of Paradise! Madelaine left here night before last for
boarding-school. But what school it is, or where it is, you’ll never
learn—if I can help it!”
“Hid her away from me, eh?”
“Speaking bluntly, precisely that! For a time at least.”
“All right, Aunt Gracia! If you want to make it personal, I accept the
challenge. We’ll see who gets Madelaine in the end—you or I. Only be a
good sport if you lose, Aunt Grace. Be a good sport if you lose!”
He vaulted the hedge and was gone.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER X
THE SEX
I
In the summer of 1904, the Methodist Sunday school held a picnic six
miles up the river. It was a popular place for picnics,—a glen sloping
down to a bathing beach, roofed with tall hemlocks and cut off from the
road by a level meadow that made an excellent ball field.
Nathan’s father had no grudge against picnics, at least Sunday-school
picnics. But he did resent the dangerous mingling and flagrant
propinquity of the sexes which such affairs occasioned. So Johnathan,
not being able to attend the picnic himself and “keep an eye” on the
boy, prohibited him the outing altogether. Girls—slathers of girls—would
attend and lead Nat’s feet into paths of wickedness and byways that were
vile. Johnathan had to go to Williams Falls and “see about a position”
which had been “offered” him at more money than he was making in the
cobbler shop. But Nathan’s mother, half in pique at John and half in
distressed mother-love at the bitterness of her boy’s disappointment,
told him to go ahead and enjoy the picnic and if his father said
anything on his return, she would pay the piper.
Bernie Gridley’s father cared nothing about picnics, even though he was
a deacon in the church. The Duchess expected to attend merely to
chaperone Bernice. But at the last moment the 8:10 train pulled into the
Paris station with Gridley relatives. So the Duchess had to consign
Bernice-Theresa to the watchful care of a much harassed and overworked
Sunday-school teacher who later had a beau herself. Nathan and the
little Gridley girl became babes in the wood. They needed no
encouragement to make the most of their opportunity.
It was one of those perfect August days of which young men write sonnets
and older men compose symphonies. The sky gave no suggestion of the
thunderstorm which was to come at three o’clock, interrupt the ball
game, send the picnickers scurrying to cover and leave the world washed
afterward in moist and golden glory.
There is small space here for a detailed account of that day’s program,
the sports or the luncheon or the minor mishaps or the shower or the
return homeward afterward by moonlight. Only a brief record of a tryst
which Nathan and I kept with two little girls off in leafy woods.
A path led from the grove over the hill to the northward. Knee-high with
vagrant grass, bordered by white birches, poplars and brambles, it wound
into the thickest, quietest part of that forest which once stretched
from the Paris town line to Center Wickford. We had not been in the
grove an hour before Nathan came dodging excitedly through the crowd. He
caught my arm and drew me aside.
“I’ve seen Bernie and Elinore!” he cried feverishly, Bernie being about
all the picnic meant for him, anyhow. “Her Ma couldn’t come and she’s
all alone. She says let’s go way off up the woods and eat our dinners
together, just us four! Oh, gee, Billy, what a chance—what a chance!”
“Chance for what?” I demanded.
My friend was crestfallen.
“Why—why—to just be with ’em all day—and perhaps we can kiss ’em——!” He
added this last in a whisper.
“Oh, hake! I got sumpin’ on my mind besides always kissin’ girls. I
wanner see the sports and try for a prize!” But he persuaded me.
Nathan carried his luncheon under his arm in a paper. Already it was
misshapen and greasy with handling. Some boys had pushed it from his
grasp and used it as a football. It consisted of three very fatty
doughnuts and some thick slices of soggy, indigestible oatmeal bread
with equally indigestible chunks of hard cheese between them. This he
proposed to open in front of Bernie. It made me nervous.
Shortly before twelve o’clock, therefore, we slipped away from the
prosaic rabble and followed two bareheaded, beribboned coquettes up the
woods road. And by processes and maneuvers which would only be
recognizable by boys, Nathan ultimately found himself carrying Bernie’s
dainty lunch basket and I had become the personal knight and escort of
the Carver girl.
Elinore and I loitered behind, of course with deliberation and
premeditation, and Bernie and Nathan disappeared over the top of the
hill. And we saw not one another again until the day was far spent and
we were forced by sunset to come forth from Avalon.
The Gridley girl affected to be “mad” a goodly portion of that
setting-out and had to be coddled and entreated and coaxed persistently
to tell the cause of her distemper. By the time it had been negotiated,
restraint and bashfulness had disappeared. Thereupon the Gridley girl
exercised the prerogatives of Eve’s daughters since the flood, called
upon the Forge boy to fetch and carry, to suffer her idiosyncrasies and
foibles, to become deliriously happy or excruciatingly miserable as she
persisted in references to a future in which the Forge boy did or did
not have a part. And so in due course they came to a far woodland brook
that trickled musically over mossy stones. The pines grew silent and
lofty here. The banks were strewn with needles. A trout pool milled with
the sluggishness of deep water a few yards beyond an overhanging
bowlder. The Gridley girl at once commented upon its excellence as a
place in which to lunch. “It’s so awful private” was the way she put it.
So they sat down. And the water babbled past them into eternity.
What mattered it that the Forge boy’s hair curled long and uncut behind
his ears; that he wore a suit his father had shined by prior use to
waxen smoothness; that his face still retained at least twelve thousand
of the original thirty thousand freckles; that his collar was wrinkled
and his shoes were dusty? The Poet lay at the feet of his Inspiration
and all the world was fair.
What mattered it also that their talk was of silly nothings and what
they spoke or did was forgotten almost as soon as said or done? The boy
had a girl of topaz eyes off alone in leafy woods and all the clocks of
time ran down.
II
“I’m sorry I tried to kiss you that night in the vestry,” the boy
blurted out. He was lying on his chest, pegging his knife in the
needles. “I felt awful when your father came down and caught me——”
The girl turned her face in amazement.
“Kiss me!” she said faintly. “Was that what you were up to?”
“Why, yes! Didn’t you know?”
“I thought you were fooling—that you jumped out to scare me.”
Each colored dully and looked away. The girl’s hat was tossed carelessly
at one side. She sat with her chubby arms clasped about her knees.
“Well, I was tryin’,” confessed Nathan nervously.
“But for the land’s sake, why make such an awful job of it? You almost
knocked me over.”
“There wasn’t any other way I could do it. My folks never let me go to
kissin’ parties or things like that.”
Silence ensued. Then the precocious, oversexed little lady, several
years older in worldly wisdom, picked apart a near-by star-flower as she
observed coyly:
“You must have wanted to kiss me awful bad to go to all that trouble to
do it.”
“I guess I did, Bernie.”
“Then why don’t you make a good job of it—now? There’s no one here to
stop you, is there?”
The world reeled. Nathan grew giddy.
“Aw, go on!” he cackled. “You’re only foolin’!”
“You might try and see—if you weren’t so awfully slow. That’s mostly the
trouble with you, Nathan—you’re slow!”
“And you won’t be mad——?”
“What if I am? A girl always loves the man who does things he wants,
whether she gets mad or not.” Bernie had secured this sort of thing
undoubtedly from her mother’s Pansy Series.
The boy’s embarrassment was so great that Bernice reached her hand out
to him, a soft, damp hand, though she looked in the opposite direction.
He took the hand, timidly at first, and considered it as Adam considered
the Apple.
He sat up beside her with a tremendous yawn, as though he had lain too
long and would change his position. As for the girl, she was a bit
frightened, white-faced. But an atavism in her blood was militant. She
was afraid and yet she wasn’t afraid. Any woman might explain it.
“Aw, can I really kiss you, Bernie?”
“I said so, didn’t I? And if you’re goin’ to do it, for pity’s sake,
hurry up!”
He leaned over and kissed her on a peach-blown cheek, searing hot and
zero cold by turns. And no more chaste kiss was ever given The Sex.
But Bernie responded in a way that Nathan never forgot. She turned
her face, her nostrils breathed into his own, she kissed
him—once!—twice!—three times!—heavy, impulsive, lumberous kisses,
squarely on his mouth.
The Forge boy wanted to flee or wanted to cry; he couldn’t quite decide
which. And because he couldn’t decide he stayed where he was and waited
for the rocking hysteria of reaction to pass.
“Let’s—let’s—do it again,” the girl suggested, as the boy sat stiffly,
vaguely remembering something about the eye of God being upon the sinner
even in the wilderness.
They went through that ecstasy again and again. And astounding to
record, the boy suddenly leaned over with his face on his arm.
“Natie Forge! What in the world is the matter?” cried the stupefied
girl.
“Dunno,” said the lad. “But somehow I feel we oughtn’t.”
“Well, I like that! Why oughtn’t we?”
“Dunno. And besides—it hurts!”
“Hurts? What hurts?”
“Didn’t you never have anything happen to you that felt so good it
hurt?”
“Well, you are a queer one!”
“I know. That’s what Pa’s always sayin’! And—and—everybody. I wish I
wasn’t!”
“Here I let you kiss me as much as you want and you make me feel as if I
was doin’ sumpin’ wicked. Nathan Forge—I’m mad! I never want to speak to
you again!”
“Aw, don’t be mad, Bernie. I didn’t mean nothin’! Honest!”
“Mother always said you were a yokel. I don’t know what it means but you
are one, all right.”
Under her exasperation the Dresden Doll was furious. She had lowered the
lattice of her modesty and knew it perfectly. A crass boy was vaguely
sounding a warning.
The quarrel was patched up somehow and they ate their lunch, at least
they ate Bernie’s lunch. For when the Dresden Doll removed the cover
from her dainty repast, an awful qualm smote Nathan at the coarseness of
his own. With the subtlety of a boy, Nathan managed to push his package
off the bank into the brook. When Bernie squealed a warning, the boy
fell clumsily in his efforts to recover. So it floated away downstream,
out of sight and certainly out of the possibility of humiliating
mastication. Thereat Nathan affected to be both regretful and
indifferent. He declared he could subsist till supper without luncheon.
The Israelites fasted for forty days, didn’t they, and remained alive?
But Bernie prevailed upon him that she had enough in her basket for half
a dozen boys. So they ate their meal together, eyes averted.
It was early afternoon when the girl suddenly cried:
“Do you know what I’d like to do? For once in my life without Mother to
say ‘Shocking! Shocking!’ I’d like to paddle in this brook as if I was
common, and like vulgar children.”
“You might fall in and get your clothes wet and have to go home all
drenched and slithery.”
“But you could take off your shoes and stockings and let me hold your
hand!”
Nathan demurred. He could not have explained just why. But the girl was
not to be denied. She laughed at his discomfiture, sat down near the
water’s edge, removed her pretty buckled slippers, peeled off her lisle
stockings, rolled up her underclothing. Then she waded—timidly at
first—out into the brook, squealing with delight. And she pulled her
skirts higher and higher. Finally she had them above her dimpled knees.
From his place on the bank, Nathan watched her and yet tried not to
watch her. Much of the real Bernice, down underneath her mother’s
affectation and snobbery, was revealed that day in the extravagance of
her kisses and the bold display of her limbs.
Four short years later Bernice Gridley was a mother. So it was more than
a child’s sexless figure displayed to young Nathan that day. The boy’s
nerves began cutting strange capers. Across forehead and chest was a
queer, constricted feeling.
The girl kicked and shrieked and played in the water. She called upon
Nathan to follow. But the perturbed boy, discovering for the first time
that his physical being was a thing apart from himself, tried to behave
indifferently, interest himself in something else. For him the girl—all
girls—changed again with that experience. Bernice was no longer a fellow
human, a playmate, even some one to be kissed deliciously.
Bernice laughed when she beheld the perturbation she was causing.
Secretly she exulted. It was the first time she had been privileged to
thus test her physical charm maliciously.
But more than the disclosure of the Gridley girl’s limbs was in store
for Nathan that afternoon. Bernice splashed in the water until she
slipped and fell. With a wild scream and a tremendous plunge, she went
down and for a sickening moment the water eddied over her.
Nathan was in the brook at once. He clutched at Bernie’s dress before
she could be carried out into the greater depth. Unmindful of himself,
he got his arms beneath her. With the panic-stricken girl gasping and
choking, he lifted her and carried her back to shore.
The water made her lacy clothing sinuous about her body.
“I’m wet—wet—wet to the s-s-skin!” she chattered, as she tried to pull
her sloppy skirts about her limbs—velvety limbs, now ruddy with the
shock of the water. “Oh, what will I do—whatever will I do?”
“Guess by the looks of the sky, both of us is goin’ to get still wetter
before we leave,” Nathan managed. “We’re goin’ to have a nawful shower.
Listen!”
In the high northwest the thunderheads had been piled up. A few moments
later the storm broke. Boy and girl were immediately soaked to the last
inch of their frightened, quivering bodies. That thunderstorm saved
Bernice a bad piece of explanation when she finally entered the home of
her parents that evening.
The thunder rattled and clacked furiously about the heavens. The great
drops of rain pelted the forest foliage and surface of the brook like
bullets. And huddled side by side under a tree, Nathan and Bernie drew
close together and covered their heads as best they could with Nathan’s
coat.
The girl gripped the boy hysterically when the thunder bowled loudest.
The boy was badly frightened himself but he strove to comfort her. And
through it all he sensed her soft, vibrant, rain-soaked body and the
abyss of sex opened wider and wider.
III
The storm finally ended, the clouds parted, the thunder moved off
muttering to the southwest. A radiant sun broke through. Bernice seated
herself in its invigorating warmth. She removed the bedraggled ribbons
and shook down her straw-colored hair. Barefooted and nude of limb
still, she recovered her composure and began to make light of the
incident. But Nathan was thoughtful.
“You act as if you were afraid of me,” Bernice cried petulantly.
The boy sat apart, beating a stick intermittently on the leaves.
“Aw, I ain’t afraid,” he laughed nervously, there being few things less
pitiful than a boy striving to affect the sophistication he knows he
lacks.
“Then what’s the matter with you? Have I done anything ‘specially
wicked?”
“No! You ain’t done nothin’ wrong, I guess.”
But they stole forth, back down the woods road as Adam and Eve must have
stolen from the Garden.
Just before they emerged into the clearing, Bernice turned. She clutched
Nathan’s coat.
“Don’t you ever tell I took off my shoes and stockings!” she commanded.
“Promise me! And don’t you dare break your promise!”
The boy agreed readily enough.
“And now, Nathan Forge,” she said, with a subtle glance around, “kiss
me! Just once more. For the last time! A good one!”
But when the boy complied, his face burned. In the kiss he sensed no
ecstasy.
He went out to the picnic grounds to run directly into the clutches of
his father.
“Where have you been?” Johnathan demanded ominously. The whipcords of
his neck stood out in anger.
“Nowhere,” whimpered Nathan. “Just over in the woods.”
“I’m told you’ve been missing all day.”
The boy’s face held the story.
“Have you been alone?”
“N-N-No!”
“Who’s been with you?”
“Billy!”
“And who else?”
The boy hesitated. It was hard to lie. But his little sister piped up
shrilly:
“Bernie Gridley and Elinore Carver’s been with ’em! I seen ’em go!”
“Is this so?” demanded Johnathan.
“Yes,” confessed the boy boldly.
“You’ve been—off in the woods—with a girl—all day?”
“Yes, sir!”
“In spite of all that I’ve warned you?”
“Yes, sir!”
Johnathan reached out and lifted his terror-paralyzed son in his wrath.
“You march home!” he commanded. “We’ll see about this! What are you
doing here at the picnic, anyhow, when I said you couldn’t come?”
“Ma said I could.”
“But what did I say to you?”
“You said—I couldn’t.”
“Then you deliberately disobeyed there, also?”
“But Ma said——”
“Never mind what your mother said. You don’t do what your mother says.
You do what I say! March!”
The worst part of that whole picnic-day episode wasn’t the humiliation
before all the boys and girls and particularly Bernie, nor the thrashing
that followed. It was that his mother had promised immunity, to defend
him, to “pay the piper” and did not keep her word.
Johnathan Forge got his boy home, took him out in the woodshed and
ordered him to strip to his pelt. Before the flogging began, he
prolonged the terror by coddling the weapon of assault—a couple of feet
of stiff harness tug—talking to it, explaining to it how he had told his
boy to stay away from the picnic and “his boy” had disobeyed; how he had
been told to always keep away from girls and had disobeyed there also.
Then he laid it on.
Sordid all this to recount? As well delineate Johnathan thrashing his
boy around the calendar and be done with it. But it was a matter of
principle with Johnathan. He was responsible for his boy’s soul to God.
The Bible said so.
Whack! Whack! Whack!
IV
Nathan lay on his bed that night with his arms behind his head and
stared up into the dark.
Moment by moment he lived that galaxy of sylvan love over. Branded as
with searing iron into his brain was the picture of Bernice Gridley
knee-deep in the brook water, or as he had laid her down on the hemlock
needles when he had subsequently rescued her.
“I’ve got to marry her! I’ve got to marry her right off,” he told
himself. “Grandfather Forge married at sixteen, he said so; and Grandma
Forge was only fourteen. That’s only two years older’n me, and what’s
two years? I’ll ask her! I’ll ask her to-morrow.”
And the poor young ass did.
It was down along the path through the Haskell meadow,—the “short cut”
from Matthews Court to Windsor Street. It was by accident he encountered
the girl but he stopped her.
“Marry you! Marry you!” she choked. “I think you’re raving crazy. I’m
not old enough to marry anybody. Besides, I’m mad at you, anyhow!”
“What for, Bernie?”
“You broke your promise! You tattled about me going into the water.”
“I did not!”
“You did!”
“You can’t prove it!”
“Well, somebody did and it might as well been you! Besides, last night I
dreamed you did—and that settles it.”
“But I can’t help what you dream!”
“Well, I’m mad, anyhow. You haven’t the backbone of a fish! You let your
father jaw you, right there in sight of everybody.”
“Could I help it? He’s bigger’n me. And besides, he’s my father.”
“If my father dared to jaw me like that in front of everybody
I’d—I’d—I’d get a gun and I’d shoot him dead! I told you that before.”
“I hate him as much as I love you, Bernie. At the same time, I can’t
kill him.”
“Well, you wanted to know why I won’t marry you and I’m telling you.
Besides, who’d marry us?”
“We could run away, Bernie. I could tell some minister we’re older than
we are. You could get some of your mother’s long dresses perhaps and I’m
puttin’ on long pants next week anyhow——”
“And who’d support us?”
“I’ve reached man’s estate. I’m going to work next week, anyhow. If I’ve
reached man’s estate and am going to work and earn money, I’ve got a
right to have the things a man has—a wife, for instance!”
“Where are you going to work?”
“In—in—your father’s tannery. And if I’ve got a wife, maybe my father
will let me have my own money for myself. He’ll have to! The law’d make
him——”
“Well of all things! Nathan Forge! And do you think I’d marry a man who
worked in a smelly tannery?”
“Your father does!”
“My father owns it. It’s different. Now I know you’re crazy! I bet your
father hit you over the head and made you crazy! I’ve heard of such
things. And if you don’t get out of my way I’m going to scream!”
“Bernie—don’t go off mad! I ain’t crazy, Bernie——”
“When I get married it’s going to be a millionaire. And he’s not going
to dress like a tramp, or go around with freckles, or need a hair-cut,
or be so slow when I let him kiss me he makes me feel I was doing
something wicked.”
“Bernie—you said in your letters you l-l-loved me! You said——”
“Oh, can’t you take a joke? That was just for fun, and besides, we
aren’t grown up so it didn’t mean anything, anyhow!”
“You were only foolin’?”
“Well, I didn’t suppose you’d take it serious—in such a foolish way as
this. Why, my father would horsewhip you if he even dreamed you’d asked
such a thing.”
“Bernie—you aren’t—you aren’t—playing fair.”
“Well, a girl doesn’t have to play fair—if she doesn’t want. Anyhow,
you’re not the boy I’d marry even if we were grown up. You aren’t
handsome! You’re nothing but an ordinary little freckle-faced frump.”
“Then why—did you let—me kiss you——”
“Oh, just because I liked it. And even so, you didn’t care enough to
come with me into the water and save me from getting all wet. And—and—I
hate you and I’m going to Rutland to spend the summer next week and then
I’m going to private school down to Mt. Hadley in the fall. My mother
said so. She heard about what happened at the picnic. She said I wasn’t
going to stay around Paris and get mixed up with the son of any village
cobbler. I’m too high-class. Now you get out of my way or I’ll yell for
help!”
“You’re goin’ away and I’m never goin’ to see you any more?”
“I am. And I’m tickled to death to forget you!”
When Nathan could see through his misery, the girl had vanished.
V
The following Sunday, tramping out on the Wickford road, Nathan beheld a
two-seated Concord buggy drawn by a well-lathered horse climbing the
hill toward him.
The Dresden Doll, never so dainty, or frilled or furbelowed, sat in the
front seat beside a fellow whom Nathan had never seen. The Carver girl
with another young stranger occupied the back seat.
Stopping aghast, Nathan looked directly into the Gridley girl’s eye.
She did not see him. She looked through and beyond him. There was no
recognition.
But after the rig had passed, leaving a leg-weary, dusty-shoed boy
standing in his heart-hunger by the fragrant brambles, one of the
quartette passed a remark, which he knew in his hot shame referred to
himself.
A sneering little laugh drifted back to him. The rig reached the hilltop
and passed over out of sight.
VI
That night Nathan took a bundle of big square envelopes tied with a red
ribbon, Bernie’s letters, and put them where the sight could no longer
hurt him. He hid them on a beam close to the eaves out in the three-foot
attic over the Forge ell. Then he crawled back over the studding and
buttoned the low door that led to that windowless garret from his
bedroom. That button also fastened a door on a chamber in his little
heart. He had completed his first thumb-nail cycle with The Sex.
His cynical observations about “girls,” delivered in the family circle,
gladdened the heart of his father and made the latter feel that his
precepts were at last bearing fruit, that he had a son who might not be
quite so incorrigible as he had begun to fear.
That Christmas he gave Nathan five dollars and reminded the boy of his
paternal generosity all through the balance of the year.
But the five dollars meant nothing to Nathan. He was compelled to
deposit it in the Paris Savings Bank. Johnathan “borrowed” it three
years later to help pay a grocery bill.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XI
POET IN HOMESPUN
I
Great was the exasperation among the local school teachers when it
became known that Nathan was not going on into high school in September.
Cora Hastings, Nathan’s last teacher and the good woman, by the way, who
did more than all others to encourage his literary fluency and poetical
promise, took it upon her sparse, capable shoulders to wait upon the
boy’s father and “speak him a piece of her mind.”
“Don’t you know your boy has been the brightest English scholar in the
whole eight grades?” she demanded scathingly.
“Well,” retorted Johnathan, “just what is it your business”
“I’ve been his teacher and I know what’s in him. Let alone to study and
equip himself, Nathan will make his mark in the world. Take him from
school now, and all you may have is a mere working man.”
“I’m not ashamed of having him a working man. His folks were all working
people. Look at me! No airs to us!”
“Do you want your boy to turn out a fool?”
“Better a working fool than an educated fool. But I’m not afraid of his
bein’ a fool. Work never made a fool out of nobody.”
“Don’t you want him to be a success?”
“If he’s got it in him to be a success it’ll come out anyhow, school or
no school. If he hasn’t, schoolin’ ‘ll be wasted. But it isn’t wholly
that. I need his money. I don’t make no bones about saying so. I’m a
poor man, ma’am. It’s about time the boy commenced paying me back for
some of the trouble and expense he’s been since he was born.”
“Why should he? He didn’t ask to be born!”
Johnathan dodged that. “I had to work at his age and pay back my
father.”
“And hasn’t the memory of that injustice softened you toward you own
son?”
“Injustice? What injustice? I always had to work. I never even had as
much schoolin’ as Nat has already. And look at me!”
“Yes, look at you!—A bigoted, psalm-singing, heart-hardened,
petulant-mouthed, intolerable old hypocrite! There!”
“What? What’s that you say?”
“You heard me! You’re all of that and more. And the whole town knows it.
You’ve got a boy as rare and fine and promising as you’re common and
coarse and vulgar. And you’re deliberately wrecking his life by taking
him away from his studies, setting him at work in a horrid smelly
tannery for a few easy dollars. Somebody ought to have the law on you!”
“And you’re nothing but a fussy, homely, trouble-messin’ old maid. You
better go find a man and have a few young ones of your own before you
come ’round tellin’ other people how to raise theirs. If this is all you
come to see me about, I guess you can hoof it!”
“Don’t you know your boy is capable of writing poetry!” demanded the now
hysterical teacher.
It was the worst thing she could have said.
“No, I don’t. But if he is, all the more reason why he should go to the
tannery and learn to skin cows! And the sooner the better!”
“Don’t you want to see your own son famous?”
“I’ve got no guarantee he’ll be famous. But I’m sure, darned sure, of
the money he can earn between now and the time he’s twenty-one. Anyhow,
knowing how to work and earn money ain’t goin’ to stop him bein’ famous,
as a poet or anything else, if he’s got it in him!”
“But these years of his life are the most valuable he’ll ever have!”
“The more reason why he ought to learn to make money in ’em!”
“It’s a mystery why God sends children to such as you!”
“Well, He sends ’em and I reckon He knows his business. He’s been
running this planet a darned long time.”
Threat, appeal, argument did no good. Nathan went into Caleb Gridley’s
tannery, into the foul, revolting, messy, nauseating part of the
business, and for six days of working from 6:30 in the morning until
6:30 at night he received four dollars, not in cash but in credit on the
old harness bill. In sixteen weeks the debt was paid. Then Johnathan
“began realizing good hard cash” on Nathan’s earning abilities.
Nathan’s sister went on through the graded school and high school. It
was Nathan’s money which bought her graduation dress.
It was a very pretty dress. It cost twenty-nine dollars.
II
Never did a boy change so completely or age so quickly as Nathan in the
three years which followed. He was sick and broken the first two or
three weeks at the sights he was compelled to witness and the smells
which adhered to him like a plague wherever he moved. I tried to get him
to come out on Sundays.
“I dunno, Bill,” he would answer, “I don’t seem to care much about
fooling ’round. Seems as if I’m tired these days, tired all the while. I
no more’n get home Saturday night than it’s Monday morning and I gotta
go back to it all. Oh, Bill, it’ll kill me sure. You don’t know anything
about it. It’s awful!”
The boy lost weight. He grew more and more listless—bitter, moody.
“I don’t care whether I live or die,” he wailed one day when I mentioned
that after the Academy I was going on to college. “Sometimes I wish old
‘Cock-eye’ Richards’ knife would slip when he’s skinnin’ and take me
right acrost the throat.”
The boy’s life suddenly became a hopeless, hideous slavery. The horror
of his work lay in his imagination. A lad of coarser fiber would have
become inured to the tannery. Nathan never became inured to it. Yet he
stuck it through. There was no alternative.
Sunday afternoons he would wander over the hills, lie on his back beside
some peaceful meadow brook and dream his dreams. He began taking a pad
and pencil on these solitary excursions, or a book. He cared little for
Old Cap Collier or King Brady or the other penny-dreadfuls which were
then in their heyday. His choice was poetry, fairy tales, Shakespeare.
“What’s the use of reading that stuff?” he demanded contemptuously one
day, after finishing a sample hair-curler I had shown him. “It’s all
coarse and mechanical, and you know the villain’s going to die at the
right minute, anyhow, and the hero win out and all live happily ever
after. And if you know it in advance what’s the use of spending a whole
day readin’ through it to find it out?” Then the boy pulled a volume of
poems from beneath him, a book that Miss Cora Hastings had loaned him.
He read me “Grey’s Elegy.”
I confess that, red-blooded, hob-raising kid that I was, the sweet
melancholy of the lines, as Nathan read them, “got” me. Often I found
myself watching my friend, at a loss to understand him.
The other day while searching among the compartments in an old wallet, I
came upon a folded, time-yellowed sheet of foolscap on which some verses
had once been penned in a youthful but symmetrical hand. It was a poem
which Nathan composed back in those years before he had “found” himself.
These are sample lines of what this sixteen-year-old was producing:
DAY DREAMS
“Somewhere over the miles, dear heart,
Off over a turquoise sea,
There’s a pleasant isle that is set apart
For your rendezvous with me.
There’ll be never a cloud in its skies, dear heart,
And the days will be always fair,
For free as the summer winds that blow
We will live in our Eden there,
Somewhere!
“There’ll be no more heartache to spoil our dreams,
There’ll be no more griefs to grieve,
We’ll wander down eons of golden years
Through the vales of Make-Believe.
And I’ll drink of your lips, your eyes, your arms,
Till I’m drunk with their beauty rare,
And you’ll nestle me down till my stupor goes,
On a bed of your glorious hair.
Somewhere!
“The wealth of the earth and the sun shall be ours,
We shall know neither pride nor shame
Nor ever grow weary of too much romance
Nor spoil our sweet isle with a name.
And no one shall find our rendezvous,
No world break the spell with its blare,
For that will be Heaven—just you and I,
With no one to part us or care.
Somewhere!”
I submit this poem for what it is worth. The meter undoubtedly might be
improved. Yet it shows the way the lad’s mind was leaning, the romancer,
the idealist, the colorist, the emotionalist, always.
Johnathan Forge viewed a certain change in his son with satisfaction.
“Thank God,” he cried, “I’ve broken that boy’s false pride at last. Now
maybe he’ll get solid ground under his feet and amount to something.”
III
Yet one noontime in the October which followed, Nathan so deported
himself in a certain pugilistic situation that the matter of broken
pride was left open to reasonable doubt.
The boy had drawn apart to work upon a rime in a notebook. He found no
recreation in sitting around the edge of the yard listening to cheap
opinion, telling off-color stories, pitching horseshoes or flipping
pennies. In a warm spot in the sunshine he worked upon a new poem which
he had titled “Girl-Without-a-Name.” One Silas Plumb stole up and
snatched the notebook from him. Worse and more mortifying, Si headed
back for his fellow laborers. Noting that what he had snatched was
poetry, he was seized with unholy glee. Disregarding Nathan’s cries of
anger, Plumb leaped on a crate and dramatically began to “elocute”—
“Listen, fellers! This is rich! Poetry! Listen! ‘You came to me in my
dreams last night, Dear Girl-Without-a-Name——”
Blind, unreasoning rage boiled upward through Nathan. Chagrin and
indignation fired every nerve in the boy’s body to murderous
retaliation. Plumb was a heavy-footed, rumple-clothed, corn-fed son of a
typical Vermont small town. He was blue-eyed, shocky-headed, red-cheeked
and three years Nathan’s senior. But to have the innermost privacies of
his romantic soul ballyhooed for the bucolic ribaldry and bovine
amusement of the tannery men was like maddening vitriol poured on Nat’s
naked flesh. He lurched for the notebook and when Si held on, Nathan
struck him the hardest smash in the face he had ever received in his
life.
Si held his sickly grin for about ten seconds. Then it froze on his
mouth. He spat out blood and teeth. Purple rage flooded his features.
“I’m goin’ to get you for that!” he swore.
He dropped off his coat, smeared his bloody mouth with the back of his
big hand and fell into clumsy fighting posture. Loafers in the tannery
came a-running. Nathan was pale but resolute. Silas struck him. Stung to
fury, Nathan hit back twice. The epochal battle began. That battle was
tannery talk for weeks, for months, for years.
“Si had the punch to push his dukes through the side of a plank fence,”
a local enthusiast described it afterward. “But young Forge hit him
three times and run around him twice while Si was makin’ up his mind
where he’d hit once.”
Back and forth across the enclosure the two youths struggled, upsetting
boxes, knocking down hides, tripping on yard refuse, falling backward
into the circle of wildly applauding spectators. Great pile-driver blows
the larger fellow smashed at his lighter opponent. Nathan’s
counter-attack was swift and rapier-keen, taking the other by surprise,
getting inside his defenses, smashing his nose, closing his eyes,
lacerating his lips, but always lacking the bodily weight to strike the
other down or finish him off with a knock-out.
There is something vitally fine and fair in an American crowd. It wants
to see the under dog get the best of it. Nathan, because of his
slenderness, was the under dog. Si sensed that the moral support of the
tanners was not with him. He grew Germanically furious.
The moral support of his fellow workers meant little to Nathan, however.
He had to finish Plumb or be finished himself. And those who, through
that summer, had called Nat a mollycoddle because he was finer grained
than themselves, were swift and fair in revising their opinion and
giving the stripling all the credit his proven prowess deserved.
The two came together in clinches only to break away when one saw an
opening for a telling blow. Twice they both went down. The battle each
time turned into a wrestling match, with any sort of a “hold”
permitted,—biting, eye-gouging and hair-tearing being eminently
permissible so long as it brought results.
At a quarter to one the fight had started. Fifteen minutes later it was
still going strong,—arms and faces of both combatants bleeding, shirts
ripped to ribbons, lungs bursting. The employees paid no attention to
the tannery whistle for the reason that no tannery whistle was blown.
The engineer and fireman were enthusiastically howling in the front row
of spectators. The absence of the whistle was responsible for bringing
Caleb Gridley down into the yard. But the old war-horse of the local
leather business was immediately too interested himself to interfere or
start his factory. He stood with a fierce, hard joy in his eye, awaiting
the finish.
That finish came at ten minutes after one. Silas, worsted but
unconquered, picked up a piece of board and swung it terribly for
Nathan’s head. A howl of protest arose, then approval as Nathan dodged.
But Nathan had not dodged far enough nor soon enough. The board ripped
his left ear from the side of his head. Silas followed in, raising one
of his big boots to kick his opponent below the belt. By accident more
than design, Nathan tripped him. As Silas went down, Nathan sent a left
jab to his jaw. It rocked the roughneck’s head. He sagged, grinned,
pitched downward on his forehead, and went peacefully off to hear little
birds sing sweetly.
The fight was finished. Likewise both participants. For Nathan saw his
man prostrate, took three steps and crumpled—senseless.
Old Caleb pushed forward. “Take the kid to the office,” he ordered
curtly. Grim satisfaction lay on his paving-block jaw. “As for that
low-brow, leave him lie busted. I stand for the man that fights fair!”
They carried the unconscious Nathan to tannery headquarters. Doctor
Johnson was summoned by telephone. Nat was losing alarming quantities of
blood from the ragged ear and more was trickling out between his teeth.
First aid was administered, but it was a sickening business.
“That’s nasty bad,” Johnson commented as he tried to wash the wound.
“It’s almost tore from his head—this ear!”
“Sew it back,” commanded Caleb.
“But he’ll bear the scar for life.”
“Can’t help that! Sew it back! Mustn’t have so gamey a little bantam
goin’ through life with one ear missin’!”
Johnson phoned for Doctor Birch to help him. Birch brought a crude
anesthetizing outfit. The ear was sewed at once to prevent the loss of
more blood. The lad was as white as paper in his coma. The exertion of
the past half-hour had been terrific. It showed grisly on his features.
Two o’clock arrived before the surgery was finished. Nat’s head was
swathed in bandages which were reduced to ribbons in the boy’s
thrashings, as he came out from under the anesthetic.
“Leave him here!” ordered Caleb. “He’s gotta stay here till he’s
stronger.” Then as Nathan gradually quieted, he demanded of the yard
boss: “What started that mix-up, anyhow?”
“Poetry!” said old Richards. “This!” And he proffered a torn and
besmirched notebook.
“Poetry!” cried Caleb. “Lemme see!”
“He’s always moonin’ ’round, writin’ poetry,” volunteered Richards. “Si
yanked it outer his hands and Nat waded into him. We always thought Nat
was a mollycoddle, sort of, ‘count of his poetry and dandified talk. But
I guess after this he can do as he pleases.”
Nathan’s weakened condition quickly induced sleep. It was night when he
awoke. He was at home and his mother was bending above him.
“My poor, poor boy!” she crooned. And for the instant, groggy and faint
with fiery pain as he was, a great up-welling tenderness toward his
mother came in Nathan. When she kissed him, his arms went up around her
frail shoulders and he clung to her.
But when he awoke the following morning all suggestions of tenderness
were missing in the petulant, whining Job’s comfort she gave him.
“You’ve bloodied all my best sheets and pillow cases!” she cried;
“besides getting your clothes all ripped and markin’ yourself for life!
Oh, you do make it so hard for your dear, dear mother—so bitter, bitter
hard!”
Nathan’s father came up during the noon hour and sat down beside the
bed. Gravely he looked at his son and admiration lurked in his weak blue
eyes.
“Well, I’m glad you’ve shown some starch at last,” he commented. “I’d
begun to think I was raising a sissy.”
Thereupon, the seventeenth time for his son’s edification and future
emulation, Johnathan launched good-humoredly into a recount of how he
(Johnathan) had whipped the town bully at fifteen, against tremendous
odds, a brick wall, and a pair of brass knuckles.
It was Johnathan’s way of being kind and showing his appreciation of
what his boy had done. The reports about town of Nathan’s prowess had
come to the father as sweet music.
Praise of his boy’s artistry, poetic talent and romantic temperament had
touched only as the wind which bloweth where it listeth. But that his
offspring had gone into a brute encounter, drawn blood, broken teeth,
gouged eyes and torn hair—coming off victor though the struggle would
mark him for life—was grand and noble and a cause for pride and
satisfaction altogether. Johnathan felt that he, too, must not be found
wanting.
So he finished off the town bully and then recounted various other deeds
of a heroic nature in which he had also played the chief male lead.
Nathan had seen his father pale before the six-pound fist of Caleb
Gridley. He had seen him shiver and quake inwardly when a neighbor
announced that he would shoot Johnathan Forge on sight for having wrung
the necks of the said neighbor’s chickens and tossed the dead birds over
the fence in penalty for wandering into the Forge garden. And Nat
wondered at just what point between boyhood and manhood his father had
lost his bellicosity and proclivities toward the manly art of
self-defense.
That is, he asked himself consciously. But in his heart he knew his
father had never whipped any bullies or any one else. He was about as
heroic as an old mop. The recount for emulation he was passing on to his
boy was pure fabrication in which the end justified the means.
Besides, Nat had heard of these Roman holidays so many times that he
could repeat them verbatim, even correct his embattled sire when
multiple narration brought exaggeration, or the father went astray on
minor detail. Nat turned over wearily, therefore, and went to sleep—in
the center of a victory over the Foxboro selectmen in which “all hands
had been ingloriously humbled and brought down to the dust”—meaning that
the Foxboro selectmen had apologized and paid costs. Which they had not.
“And I used to tell that boy stories by the hour,” Johnathan averred in
later years, “—all sorts of virile, manly stories. But he never cared a
great deal for anything I said to him. The boy and I simply couldn’t
hitch. He had his mother’s blood—he was a Farman through and through!”
Nathan came back to consciousness and realized his father was still by
his side, demanding angrily, “Are you listening?” and that Caleb
Gridley’s name was mentioned.
“He’s sent word he wants to see you as soon’s you’re fit—over to his
office. And for your own sake, young man, let’s hope he doesn’t fire you
for this mix-up!”
The father eventually went out and Nathan passed from dreams with his
eyes closed to dreams with his eyes open, pondering.
IV
Out of Nat’s convalescence the mother remembered that she “had nursed
him faithfully till she was about sick from the strain.” That she had
“made of him”—meaning undoubtedly the moment of his awakening when he
had embraced her and she had kissed him—and had done her best by him
according as the Lord gave her strength.
The father remembered he had “told the lad stories by the hour” (actual
talking time, twenty-four minutes of a single half-noon) and “cheered
him by praising him for not taking the back talk of anybody.”
But Nathan! He only remembered that his mother had fussed about the
blood on the bed clothing; that his father had come in and “reeled off
the same old pack of lies” about his own boyhood and ended by reminding
him that if he lost his job at the tannery, God help him for the father
would not, needing his money just then more than ever.
V
Nat left his bed and idled about the house. His father came home at noon
and contended that if he were strong enough to “fool around the place”
he was strong enough to “get back on the job.” So that afternoon Nat
took an hour to reel a dizzy way to the tannery office.
Caleb looked up from a pile of freight bills.
“Dad says you wanted to see me,” announced the lad. He hoped old Gridley
would “fire” him. Any job would be better than returning to the horrors
of the tannery.
“Siddown,” ordered Caleb with a wave of his slab-like hand.
The boy accepted a seat and waited, his head whirling lightly. Caleb
finished his business and then jerked his head toward a side room where
the two could talk alone. It had an unused desk, an old iron stove, a
battered table, a few chairs, an old green safe.
Caleb closed the door, motioned to a seat, found one himself and
proceeded to fall into deep thought. He cut an enormous corner from a
chunk of “chewin’.”
“Perty good scrap you put up the other day, bub,” he remarked at length.
Nathan sought to keep his mental balance, wishing some one would get him
a drink, oh, for ice water!
“Thank you,” he said weakly.
“I allus admire to see a man that can use his dukes. Head hurt you
much?”
“Yes,” the boy said truthfully.
“Hard luck! But you gotta expect bangs and bruises in this world, bub.
What’s your old man think about it?”
“He said if it lost me my job here, God help me,” returned Nathan
defiantly.
Caleb was silent for a time. Grim humor lurked in his hard old eye.
Twice he lurched forward, raised the cover and spat in the bowels of the
dead iron stove.
“That so? Sort of a goldarn slave-driver, your old man, ain’t he?”
Nathan offered no comment.
“Whatcher want to go gettin’ into that fuss with Plumb for, anyhow?”
“I was writing something—private—and Si came up and grabbed it away.
Then he wouldn’t give it back.”
Nathan stood in awe of old Gridley, partly because he was the boy’s
employer, mostly because he was _her_ father.
“Yeah,” affirmed Caleb, “what was it?”
“It was—it was—poetry,” the lad confessed lamely. He wished he could get
a drink, any kind of water if only it would keep the office from
spinning around and around.
“So you’re a poet?”
“I like to read poetry and try writing it—sometimes.”
“So I heard. I’m a bit of a poet myself!”
For an instant Nathan was dumbfounded. Had he heard aright? The boy
fought off his vertigo and stared. Was the old man jesting? But
apparently Old Caleb was never more serious in his life. Moreover, he
too was confused, as though chagrined by the confession. Nathan would
have accepted that his employer had speared grizzlies, kicked over baby
carriages, fired orphan asylums and kicked the crutches from cripples.
But a poet! It was cataclysmic.
“Did you—did you—ever write any poetry?”
“Once!”
“What for? What came of it?”
“That was a perty good piece you started to write when Plumb interrupted
you. Jake gimme the book. Then again, my wife lemme see a piece you writ
and give to my daughter a while back. You seem to be a perty good poet.
I’ll show you somethin’.”
To Nathan’s utter bewilderment, Caleb went to the green box safe. He
selected an old wallet from its cavernous compartments and returned to
his creaking seat. With his elbows on his enormous knees, he leaned
forward. He went through the wallet until he came to a paper he sought.
He drew it out with sausage-like fingers, a sheet of rusty, mildewed
parchment on which some verses had been written in violet ink.
Reverently he handed it across as though it were a million-dollar
government bond.
Nathan read:
“To G. H.
“Your eyes are like the twinkling stars.
Your voice is like the dew
I sit upon the hill and dream
Of you, my love, of you.
“You are the inspiration of my life
To you I will ever be true
When I am old and my hair is gray
I’ll ever think of you.
“All of us have a secret love
Some, memories of yesterday,
Like cake to finish a good square meal
It cheers us on our way.
—CALEB GRIDLEY.”
Paris, Vt., June 2, 1871.
The old man watched the youth’s face closely as he read. There was
pathetic anxiety in the question which followed:
“Well,” demanded Caleb, “what’s your opinion? There was folks said it
was good enough to have published—once! But I couldn’t—I couldn’t!”
The tanner sighed and arose. He walked to the window looking down on the
cluttered yard. There he stuck his big hands in his stomach pockets and
“rolled his chew.”
With the tactlessness of boyhood, Nathan announced, “The meter’s off and
besides—it doesn’t really say anything—that is, in a nice smooth way.”
If he had struck old Caleb with a rock he could not have surprised the
tanner more dynamically.
“Don’t say anything! Smooth way! Meter? What’s meter?”
“In poetry it’s the character of a stanza. It’s made up of any given
number of lines, divided into measures equal in time—and length of
syllables—and rhythmic construction.”
“Well, I’ll be damned!” cried Caleb. “Where did you learn that—them big
words and all?”
“Miss Hastings showed me. The rest sort of always came easy to me.”
“Then what the hell are you doin’ workin’ here in my place, when you got
book-learnin’ like that?”
“My father makes me.”
“He must be a dog-gone bigger fool than I allus took him for. Say that
book-learnin’ over!”
Nathan complied.
“Now what does it mean in plain Vermont jaw-music?”
Nathan was beginning to forget his dizziness.
“It means that to make poetry read smoothly the lines in each verse must
have exactly the same number of syllables. They must be emphasized in
the same way in the same place in all the verses and yet give perfect
emphasis. You’ve just got a lot of lines here with the final words
rhyming.”
“But you said it didn’t say anything!” Caleb was not angry so much as
hurt, grievously hurt. “I allus thought it said a lot,” he added, with a
little catch in his voice.
“I mean something really fine and beautiful and rare different from the
ordinary way we write or think or talk, if you understand what I mean.
For instance, you say in your first line that somebody’s eyes are like
the stars and his voice——”
“_Her_ voice!” corrected old Caleb.
“—Her voice is like the dew. Well, that doesn’t really mean anything.
Nobody ever saw a woman with eyes like actual stars or a voice like real
dew, because dew doesn’t make any noise, anyhow, let alone having a
voice. Poetry tries to say things better and softer and finer than any
one has ever said ’em before and that’s where you’ve fallen down.”
“How would you say it?”
Caleb had come across, sunk down into the creaky chair with his knees
parted, his bulbous finger tips pressed together between them, the world
and business forgot,—a gray-haired man seeking pointers in rhyming from
a minstrel with a bashed head.
“Well, what you want to express is that you sat on a hilltop thinking of
a woman. And somehow the night was so soft and wonderful you couldn’t
help comparing her with the view around you. So suppose instead of
saying you sat on the hill and thought of the woman having star-like
eyes, you looked off to some star, the prettiest, brightest of them all.
And her face seemed to come before you in it—Say, who is this woman,
anyhow?” Nathan broke off suddenly.
Old Caleb’s gaze dropped to his horny hands. He stopped chewing.
“Once on a time, bub—once on a time—back in my life—there was a girl.
Well—I loved her—and so—I writ this poetry.”
It seemed to the awe-struck boy as though a section of the universe slid
back then and disclosed the mighty works which make the worlds go
around.
Old Caleb Gridley, rich—as the village phrased it—“beyond dreams of
avarice”, hard-cider drinker, leading selectman and poker-player
Saturday nights under Jimmy Styles’ barber shop—most of all her
father!—once upon a time old Caleb Gridley had been as other boys and
men, even as Nathan. He had loved a girl and sought balm in hexameters.
“And did you marry her?” asked the astonished boy after a moment. He
spoke as the superstitious refer to the dead. “Was it Mrs. Gridley?”
“No, b’dam, it warn’t Mrs. Gridley!”
A little tear squeezed out of the man’s hard eye—a ludicrously little
tear on a ludicrously big and beefy face. It stayed there for a moment.
Then it melted.
Nathan turned and tiptoed softly out of Eden. In quite another voice he
suggested:
“I could show you, perhaps, how to polish this and make it better, by
doing it with you as we go along.”
A red-haired girl thrust her flaming head in the door.
“Mike Sweeney’s come for them calfskins and they ain’t all bundled yet,”
she whined.
“You tell Mike Sweeney to go to hell!” roared Caleb. “And if you
interrupt me again with calfskins I’ll kill the both o’ ye and fire you
beside!”
The girl closed the door. Caleb swore volubly for a half-moment about
the deficiencies of certain hirelings “these days” in the matter of
mental endowment. Then he begged:
“Go on, bub! Tell me what you was sayin’ about that poetry.”
“Let’s get a pencil and paper,” Nathan suggested. “We’ll work it out
together.”
VI
It was dark outside and the tannery had long been deserted when a
pathetically pleased old war-horse of business and an addle-pated young
poet ended the new version of Caleb Gridley’s youthful sentiment.
“Now read it all over, out loud,” ordered the tanner. He paced up and
down with his dented, dusty, greenish derby on the back of his head,
cant-hook thumbs in the armpits of his vest. Nat read:
“GRACIA
“Sometimes, dear heart, in the quiet night,
When the stars hang soft and low,
I slip away from the clash and care
To the Hills of Long Ago.
Across those Hills in the whisp’ring dark,
With the night-breeze sighing through,
I see those castles we’d planned to build
When our dreams had all come true.
“Your face grows plain in an evening star,
Ere the moon rides high and cold,
And Memory tunes with the summer night
On a chord that’s rare and old.
The troth we pledged comes in sad rebuke
To a thousand loveless days,
But wandering fires led me off and down,
‘Long a thousand ambushed ways.
“Yet somewhere deep in each tuneful night
Plays a softer, sweeter lay;
Though life is gray with a thousand sighs
It has held one deep-pink day.
And thus the glow of the Long Ago
Keeps my path to you, dear, bright;
Yet a little while and Our Morning dawns
So good night, dear heart, good night!”
“Don’t you see,” argued Nathan, “you’ve said the very same thing, only
this is smooth and dreamy. You have a feeling old Mr. Abbot, the music
teacher, might play it on his ‘cello, maybe. That’s the meaning of real
poetry, Mr. Gridley—at least as I see it—to say the common thing
uncommon, sweet and soft and low, so it lurks in your mind like music.”
“I guess I understand, bub,” replied the old man huskily. “That’s a dam’
good piece we’ve writ here. If Sam Hod, o’ the _Daily Telegraph_, can’t
make space for it, I’ll call his notes. Bub, what the plunkin’-hell does
your old man be thinkin’ of, settin’ you to skinning cows? Want to make
you at my age what I am, maybe?”
Nathan was silent for a moment. Then he answered sadly:
“It’s the money I can earn. He needs it.”
“Money? Money? Dam’ money! Once I might o’ writ pieces like this,
bub—dam’ good pieces. But my dad put his foot down and said that I
should make money too. An’ look at me! I ain’t worth nothin’ else. And
all this town knows it.” The tanner’s voice broke and he began to chew
furiously. He turned away.
“I can’t help myself,” lamented Nathan. “He makes me work and so I must.
I’m only waiting to grow. And then I’ll go away, I guess, where he can
never get trace of me again.”
“Bub, what say you and me be partners—in poetry?”
“Partners—in _poetry_?”
“I’d like to write more pieces like this, with you, bub. B’dam, I ain’t
had such a soul-satisfyin’ afternoon in thirty year! S’pose you quit the
yard and come up here and see to things about the office. The brains o’
that redheaded girl rattle round in her head like a peanut in a wash
boiler. And now and then we’ll fool with hexy—hexy——”
“Hexameters,” said Nathan gravely.
“Hexy-whatever you-call-’em,” said Caleb.
“You mean you aren’t going to fire me for fighting? You’ll give me a job
up here in the office, instead?”
“That’s it, bub. You and me! Cow hides for bread and butter. Poems for
dessert. Saturday afternoons and Sundays? What say?—what?”
“Th-Th-Thank you, Mr. Gridley,” was all that Nathan could call up. He
felt a sudden grim affection for the old tanner who had been keeping the
heart of a poet locked under his tough hide for two or three decades.
“The wages,” said Caleb, “will be two dollars more a week. I guess a
poet oughta be worth it. But the real reason for the raise is keepin’
your mouth shut. The minute you go tellin’ what you and me’s mutually
interested in—you’re fired!”
“I understand, Mr. Gridley. I’m much obliged.”
Overwhelmed with this sudden turn in his affairs, the boy began blindly
picking up the scratch papers strewn about which they had spoiled.
Carelessly he ripped them in strips until he came to the asinine lines
of Caleb’s in 1871.
“You won’t need these any more, will you,” he asked, “now that we’ve
written them better?”
The tanner rescued the sheet from the boy’s hand, however. Carefully
folding it, he laid it away in the worn, brown wallet and locked it up
in the old green safe.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XII
FIRST COMPLICATIONS
I
“The Elms” school for girls consisted of a trio of high-pillared
Colonial buildings on the main street of Mount Hadley, Massachusetts.
They stood behind lofty arches of towering trees that were old when
Washington passed through to inspect Ticonderoga.
Mount Hadley had an atmosphere possessed by many scholastic, hilltop New
England towns,—wide-verandahed, leisurely, sharply colored, exclusive.
From its diminutive brownstone Memorial library to its chaste white
churches, it expressed simplicity, asceticism, grace and dignified
charm. The nasturtium-flavored individuality of the town stood in
clearly defined contrast to the clash and clatter of muddy-guttered,
smoky-scented, foreign-populated paper cities farther down the
Connecticut. A ninety-minute suburban trolley service connected it with
Springfield, Massachusetts.
Madelaine Theddon was entering her second year at “The Elms” when, upon
emerging from the college store-and-postoffice early one September
evening, she saw a motor-car draw to the near-by curb and a man leap
out. He blocked her way with easy self-confidence. She recognized Gordon
Ruggles.
Physically, Gordon seemed to have attained maturity in a year. He had
gained in height at an expense of girth. His auto togs made him look
still taller and older. But his twisted front tooth was as prominent and
his eyelid flopped as badly as ever.
“Hello, Madge!” he cried. “Still sore?”
“I’ve never been ‘sore’ at you, Gordon. That’s a coarse and unkind thing
to say!”
“Well, you swallowed all the guff Aunt Grace handed you about me.”
“Please don’t talk so, Gordon. If you haven’t been—well, interesting,
it’s because you haven’t seemed to me to live up to the best that’s in
you.”
“You didn’t talk that way the first time we met, Madge—when Aunt Grace
was showing me the gate. You seemed like a regular girl, for a time.
Then right off you got stiff—stiff as froze mutton.”
“You didn’t act very gentlemanly around my home afterward, Gordon. Your
behavior displeased my mother. I couldn’t help charging that displeasure
against you.”
“You made me feel for a time, Madge, as if you’d give a fellow a chance.
Then you turned the glassy stare on me like—like—all the rest.” Gordon
said this in a hard, dry self-pity which he knew intuitively how to
employ with deadly effect on Madelaine’s type of femininity.
“Mother asked you not to try to see me or find out where I’d started in
school. She begged you to go away and leave me alone. And you haven’t
paid the slightest regard to her. Is that honorable? What ‘chance’ do
you want?”
“What right did she have to ask it? She flung me a dare. Because I took
it and smoked you out, she’s sore. And she’s gypping my game—with you.”
“Just what is your ‘game,’ Gordon?”
“Aw, you know what I want. You could show you were a good sport once in
a while. At least, be human. But instead of acting like a cousin, you
act—and Aunt Grace acts—as if I were a pestilence. I want to be friends
and neither of you will let me.”
Gordon had planted himself in front of Madelaine in such a manner that
she was unable to pass easily. But she was not afraid, merely annoyed.
She was willowy and fragile beside him but her calm, dark eyes searched
his own bravely.
“We can be friends, if that’s all you wish. But so long as you annoy
mother, you annoy me. And that’s all I have to say.”
“You think I am a hell-buster, don’t you, Madge? You—even you!—won’t
give me the benefit of the doubt.”
Along this attack, Gordon knew he could always score, if he acted
sufficiently persistent and apparently sincere. The quick gleam in those
expressive dark eyes showed when he had scored now.
“Gordon,” cried the girl, “why do you persist in coming up here, week
after week and month after month, talking and acting as you do? What is
it you want?”
“You’re the only girl who ever made me feel that if she were friendly,
really friendly, I could pull up and amount to something. Is it any
wonder I should be interested in sticking around? When a guy has met
that kind of girl, he’s on the outs with every one unless he can have
her to play with. And that’s you! And the truth!”
“But I can’t play around with any one. I’m attending school. And next
spring mother and I are going abroad——”
“Every one plays ’round part of the time, Madge!” Gordon came closer as
the girl shrank back. “I’ve been thinking about you nearly every day
since I met you, Madge. I’m in a rotten way. Instead of helping me, you
make it worse. Is that fair? When a fellow might go square if he had the
chance, is it fair to make it as hard as you can?”
“I don’t want to make it hard for any one, Gordon. But mother made me
promise I wouldn’t encourage you and I should keep that promise.”
“A bad promise is better broken than kept, Madge. And what kind of a
promise is it anyway, when it injures and hurts somebody?”
This sort of argument, harped upon long enough, would have the girl’s
defenses down.
“Please, Gordon, let me pass. People are watching.”
“Madge, are you afraid of me?”
“Of course I’m not afraid of you!”
“Get into the car then. For an hour let me talk to you—while we’re
driving, I mean. I’ll have you back by eight o’clock. I promise it,
faithfully. You’ve never heard my side of the story, Madge. Until you
do, it’s not fair to condemn me. Not on your mother’s say-so.”
“I can’t! I just can’t!”
Gordon’s face assumed the proper recklessness.
“All right, if that’s the way you feel about it. But next time you hear
of me raising hell don’t blame anybody but yourself. Didn’t you ever
have the feeling that no one care about you—what you did, or what became
of you? No, of course you haven’t——”
“Gord! Come back! Don’t go off feeling so!”
“I can’t help the way I feel. I’m getting to the place where I don’t
give a hang. I thought for a time you might help me. I see, as usual,
I’m out o’ luck!”
It hurt the girl to have the lad talk so, especially as he appeared
sincere. Suppose Mrs. Theddon were wrong! Suppose she _were_ prejudiced!
She, Madelaine, had known that horrible feeling of nobody caring. Was it
square of her mother to put such restrictions upon her? The girl was a
queer mixture of half woman, half child. The “child” was always the
orphan child, wondering to whom it belonged, why life had been
“different.”
“Where do you want to drive?” she asked.
“Oh, up to Amherst and back, or Greenfield; what does it matter so long
as I have a good chance to talk, and get you back by eight o’clock?”
“Well, I’ll have to tell Mrs. Anderson over to the House. And you may
have to assure her you’re my cousin. It’s against the rules otherwise,
you know.”
“Fair enough! Hustle! We’ve a couple of hours yet before dark.”
II
Madelaine soon discovered, not without annoyance, that the pummeling of
the machine precluded much confidential intercourse. Also, once under
way on the Deerfield road, Gordon’s mood shifted. He began to show off
his dexterity in managing the contraption. Beside the motors of five
years hence, it would be listed as a “haybaler.” But in Gordon’s hands
it was no “haybaler.” It was a threshing-machine with the “governor”
lost.
“I thought you wanted to tell me about yourself,” the girl reminded him
as they reached a stretch of reasonably smooth roadway three miles out
of town.
“Oh, for the love of Mike! Can’t you be human for once, Madge? Simply
enjoy yourself! Or if you can’t, let me enjoy myself. It’s enough for me
to have you along at such a time. You’re that kind of girl. That’s why
I’ve wanted you so much.”
The sun sank down behind the Berkshires. The Connecticut valley was
hushed and beautiful. Cattle lowed in moist barnyards along their way.
They heard the clinking and squeaking of milk pails and the nicker of
horses with heads hanging low over whitewashed paddock fences.
A dew mist hung above the glassy river. The world grew dreamy. Gordon
turned off upon a country road. With a sudden twinge of alarm Madelaine
lost her sense of direction.
“Where are you going, Gordon?” she demanded at the end of a half-hour.
“Oh, I know a short cut. You’ll see. Hell! _What’s that?_”
They had passed through a thickly shadowed wood. The road opened out
between a hill of undergrowth on one side and a pasture on the other. No
houses were in sight. They were surrounded by typical western
Massachusetts country. And the car had stopped abruptly.
The boy alighted, raised the hood, tinkered with the engine. He cranked
several times in silence. At first Madelaine was interested. Then she
grew annoyed. Gordon did not appear out of temper. This was unnatural.
He even stood off, looked at the machine and—grinned.
“Has anything gone wrong—seriously wrong?” the girl demanded.
“Don’t know yet. Hope not!”
He toyed with the engine again, even going to the trouble of producing a
bag of tools. Then he lighted a cigarette, inhaled a head full and
opined:
“This looks like a peach of a fix, Madge. It’s lucky I’m your cousin!”
“But I’ve got to get back by eight o’clock, Gordon. You promised that!”
“Schools make me sick! A girl as old as you having to get into the house
at dark—like a little freckled-faced brat! It’s the limit. You ought to
shock ’em good!”
“Gordon! Please see if you can’t start the car. We’ve come a long way
and an evening star is shining already.”
“I can’t help it if something’s gone wrong, can I? I’m no mechanic. I
didn’t make the machine! I’d fix it if I could!”
“You mean to say you can’t fix it—that there’s no prospect of getting it
fixed—so we can get back by eight o’clock?”
“Oh, get off your high horse, Madge! Have a heart! What do you think I’m
trying to do—get you in Dutch?”
Madelaine looked at her watch. It was twenty-five minutes past seven.
The most disturbing phase of the predicament was that she had no
knowledge of the locality nor where to go for help. Gordon lighted
another cigarette and stared at his car ruefully.
“There’s only one way out,” he finally declared, “find a house with a
telephone and have a garage car come out and tow us.”
“That will take an awful long time, won’t it, Gordon?”
“Well, and what of it?”
“But I’ve got to be back at eight, I told you! How many times must I say
it?”
“Oh, hang eight o’clock! I didn’t guarantee to get you back regardless
of accident! They ought to have sense enough to know that some things
might happen that couldn’t be helped.”
“Perhaps they would if so many girls didn’t use that accident excuse
until it’s thin and threadbare. Besides, I’m not quite convinced,
Gordon, that this is an accident. I fail to understand why your car
should stop so suddenly away off here in this lonely wood. Everything
appeared to be working excellently until we left the highway.” Her lips
grew hard. “I think you’d better start hunting that telephone, Gordon.
And I’ll go along and call mother in Springfield. It’s plain we’re not
going to return by eight o’clock or anywhere near it.”
“Well, you wait here till I go around the next turn. I’ll see if I sight
a house. If I do, I’ll call you.” But the girl did not miss the dull
angry flush on Gordon’s face at reference to Mrs. Theddon.
The fellow stumbled off down the sandy road. Madelaine waited. To run
after him would have been asinine. He was gone a disquieting time. The
girl drew her sweater-coat about her shoulders as the last daylight
faded and the stars grew brighter. It was ghastly quiet. Somewhere off
across the valley a dog barked. She heard the faint tinkle of a cow
bell. From down among the frowsy woodland ferns at her right came a
faint trickling of water. A mosquito sang close to her ear. The dew was
heavy. It gathered in huge drops on the leather seat and the thick,
brass-framed windshield.
Madelaine heard her cousin’s returning footsteps in the sand before she
discerned his figure. Then he stopped to light a cigarette.
“It was a devil of a ways, Madge, and I’m sorry I had to leave you. But
I got ’em! A tool car will come out in an hour.”
“An hour! You found a telephone?”
“A devil of a ways down the valley—yes. I had to cut through a pasture
and swamp. There’s nothing to do now but wait.”
“Gordon! I——”
“Oh, don’t get sore. I called The Elms, too. Miss Anderson said it was
all O. K. I told her we’d met with an accident—a real accident—and if
she didn’t believe it, she could call the Mohawk Garage and find out if
I hadn’t sent there for aid.”
“You called Miss Anderson? She said it would be all right? On your
honor?”
“On my honor!”
He lurched up into the machine and Madelaine had to make room for him in
the single seat.
“Mind cigarette smoke?” he asked. “It’ll keep off the mosquitoes.”
The girl was greatly troubled. She wished she could believe that when
Gordon swore “on his honor,” it was his honor.
“Great out here in the country, this time o’ night, ain’t it?” observed
the fellow, idly turning the impotent gas and spark levers beneath the
wheel.
“How far was it, Gordon, to the house where you telephoned?”
“Oh, I dunno. Couple of miles, I guess. Forget it, Madge! Too dark now
for you to make it through all that bog, anyhow.”
Gordon twisted his body around and rested one arm along the seat-back
behind her.
“Did you tell the garage men very explicitly where we were stalled?”
“Sure I did! What’s biting you, Madge, anyhow?”
“How did you describe it? Just where are we?”
“On the Shutesbury road, about eight miles above Amherst.”
“How far is it back to the main road?”
“Say, Madge! Are you afraid to wait here with me just because there’s no
houses in sight?”
“Afraid? Oh, no, Gordon. I’m not afraid of you in the least.”
“Then I wish you’d cut out the catechism.”
The girl bit her lip and slapped at a murderous mosquito on her wrist.
She drew the sweater-coat tighter about her and started that wait. She
was glad she had her purse in her sweater-coat pocket. Gordon smoked his
cigarette to the final puff and sighed philosophically as he lighted
another. He restored his arm along the back of the seat. It grew darker.
“Madge,” said he, “did you know—honestly!—you’re one of the swellest
girls I ever ran across!”
“Please don’t let’s have any cheap flirting, Gordon. I’m bothered enough
as it is, by this predicament you’ve forced upon me.”
“I’ve forced upon you! Madge, if I didn’t have a whale of a lot of
patience, you’d certainly get my goat. Here you are, away out here in
this God-forsaken spot alone with me in the dark, and you act as if we
were in the middle of Main Street, Springfield, with a whole flock of
cops looking on!”
“Just what do you mean to infer by that, Gordon? Is there any reason for
me to expect anything but the most correct conduct from you?”
“You can’t go provoking and tantalizing a fellow and expect him to
remain a dummy—forever!”
“Meaning just what, Gordon. You may speak plainly.”
“Aunt Gracia ought to have wised you to a few things. Then you’d try to
be more agreeable.”
“Your Aunt Gracia has ‘wised me to a few things’ as you so crudely term
it. Which is why I’m not afraid of you in the least.”
“Madge, let’s cut this out! I’ve got a rotten temper and I know it.
Sometimes it’s a devil of a job to hang on to it. So let’s talk of
pleasanter things. This breakdown gives me just the chance I’ve wanted
for a darn long time—the chance to talk about you! Madge, look here! I
might as well get it out of my system right off the bat and have it done
for good and all. Madge, honest-to-God, I love you!——”
“Gordon!”
“Oh, never mind the high-horse stuff! It’s no crime for a fellow to love
a girl——”
“No, but it’s a contemptible thing to intrigue one into a dilemma where
she must listen to your insults whether she cares to or not!”
“Insults!”
“Very much so, Gordon. If you were a gentleman——”
“Lookit, Madge! Do you know what I could do to you, if I wanted?”
“Yes. Being stronger physically, there are many things you could do to
me—if you wanted. The question is, would you? I hardly think you
would——”
“Wouldn’t I, though? I know this game! I’ve played it before!”
It was a reckless assertion but it escaped before Gordon gave it
thought.
His worldly wisdom had been gained through contact with femininity whose
motto was: “Treat me rough, kid,—treat me rough!” He believed a woman
enjoyed being “mauled”, even though she protested; that the man
ultimately won who had the nerve to play out his hand. And he had never
been seriously called to account for indiscretions to date. Madelaine’s
attitude was cool dare—a challenge—or he so assumed. He proceeded to
accept that challenge—to show her what unleashed male strength could do.
Laughing coolly, the lad’s arm closed tightly around Madelaine’s
shoulders. His left hand caught her two wrists and held them firmly. He
pulled the girl’s face toward him. He kissed her—as much and as long as
he pleased.
Madelaine stiffened as she might have taken a blow she could not avoid.
She did not attempt to fight back. She did not try to scream, to
struggle, to excoriate him, to claw at his eyes. She endured the
profanation until the boy’s temper was appeased. He could not hold her
so always. His own position was too contorted. The moment his iron grip
was loosened, she pushed open the car door and was over its edge in a
flash. Down into the soggy, fern-choked ditch where the water trickled
she jumped, falling on knees and hands. Her face was scratched. But she
struggled up and darted around the rear of the car.
Gordon knew she must go that way and on the opposite side he waited. His
lips were laughing but his face was white. He had struck a shin-bone in
scrambling from the machine to capture her and the pain was maddening.
As well be killed now for a sheep as a lamb! He caught the girl roughly
by her left shoulder and almost pulled her from her feet as he yanked
her toward him.
Never for an instant was Madelaine confused. Without a word she bent and
scooped a handful of sand. Squarely in the young man’s features she
threw it,—in his eyes, his nostrils, his half-opened mouth.
Gordon emitted a hoarse bellow and loosed her. In that instant the girl
darted away down the road, into the woodland shadow, back in the
direction from which they had come.
Gordon spat out mouthfuls of the grit and yowled his curses. But the
stuff in his eyes was blinding. It gouged and seared his eyeballs,
cutting and inflaming the lids so that a great wash of tears coursed
down his face, streaking it ludicrously. He groped his way to the car
and sank on the running board. Securing his handkerchief he swabbed his
eyes.
He was fifteen minutes clearing his sight. He lit the jets in the big
brass head lamps, cranked the car, scratched the varnish viciously
backing it into the brambles to turn it around, then started after
Madelaine.
He knew it to be four or five miles back to the main highway. Madelaine
could not yet have covered the distance. So the big reflectors lighted
the cloistered woods several hundred feet ahead and a cloud of ghostly
dust hung low in his rear.
Madelaine, fleeing along the shadowed wood-road, heard and saw the
machine coming behind, before it made the turn. She darted into a copse
of willows and hid there until it passed, Gordon low above the wheel,
one hand holding his handkerchief to his face. So he missed her,
ultimately reaching the Amherst highway in another fit of black rage and
disappointment.
It was after nine o’clock when Madelaine emerged from the wood. She saw
the valley and its main highway ghostly in the starlight before her. Far
to the north an electric car was coming,—bobbing up and down on the
uneven roadbed. She climbed a low fence on the south and ran swiftly
across the hay stubble in a diagonal direction. With deer-like,
gymnastic suppleness she covered the distance. Into the highway she
finally stumbled, hair fallen free and lungs distressed. But the
electric car was still far down the line. She had time to recover her
breath, cleanse her scratched face, and arrange hair and clothing before
the car worked its rocking way toward her.
No one could detect in the pretty, flushed girl who boarded that trolley
the recent victim of a near-assault in the woods to the eastward.
The car went through to Holyoke. Madelaine remained aboard. While
waiting to secure a Springfield connection, she slipped into a High
Street drug store and called Mrs. Anderson. As she now suspected, Gordon
had not ’phoned The Elms. Mrs. Anderson was informed that she need not
expect her pupil back that evening, as Madelaine had left suddenly for
Springfield. Then Madelaine called her mother but her trolley arrived
before she had secured her number.
Gordon left his auto on the main road, extinguished its lamps and went
back toward the woods afoot, hoping to encounter his nimble
foster-cousin.
“All right, you little wildcat,” he snapped as he returned to his
machine an hour later. “Get lost if you want! But believe me, next time
I get you alone, it’ll be where there’s no sand to throw in my eyes. A
catty woman’s dirty trick! We’ll see!”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XIII
GOD AND THINGS
I
A favorite retreat for most of the Paris boys in those days was the
region known as “down the river.” From the Process Works dam to the mill
pond at Hastings Crossing flowed a wide, smooth body of water between
indolent, pastoral hills and fern-clogged, wooded shores musty with
swamp bog or rotting second-growth.
Often Nathan and I borrowed Pete Collins’ old red scow, let the current
carry us dreamily down-stream in the afterglow, to work our way slowly
homeward under the stars. The hills, mist-haunted, were exotic in those
late evening hours. Trees in the silhouetted woods rose weird against
the sky. It was not difficult to imagine ourselves back in Neolithic
ages,—those trees rising out of decaying fens, with outlandish shapes
wallowing in the bogs along the shore.
They were pleasant, never-to-be-forgotten nights,—those trips down the
river. To the dull, rhythmic knock of oars in creaky oarlocks, and the
drip of warm water as we disturbed the far-flung expanse of fallen
stars, we talked of many things. Our elders might have smiled if they
had heard. But then, if our elders could have heard, we would never have
given those long, long thoughts expression.
One sultry sunset we had gone down the river and were opposite Haskell’s
clearing on our return, when Nathan, who was lying along the boat’s
bottom, with arms behind his head, remarked in his slow, meditative way:
“Billy—did you ever wonder about the stars?”
“Not especially. What about the stars?” I asked.
“Did you ever imagine you were God, away above all the suns and worlds,
looking down now and then at the earth? It would be an awful small
place, the earth now, wouldn’t it?”
“I suppose it would,” I agreed.
The boy was silent for several minutes. Then he continued:
“If some of those stars are suns—like I read in a book a while back—and
each sun has its worlds revolving about it too, the earth’s only an
awful small speck in a great big space, isn’t it, Billy? It can’t be
anything else!”
“Well, and what if it is?”
“If the earth’s only an awful small speck in a great big space, think
how much smaller we livin’ people must show up—down here on it. I don’t
mean in size, Billy, I mean importance. Well, then, if you were God,
away off up in the heavens, what would one little earth like this amount
to, anyhow? Still less, what would any one person or persons amount
to—you and me, for instance? If you or I wanted to go to the devil, be
just as bad as we pleased, do anything we wanted, what really big
difference would it make? Do you know, Billy, I don’t believe God gives
any single person half so much attention, or cares half so much what
becomes of him, as a lot of grown folks try to make out. It’s just
conceit. That’s the word, Billy; conceit! Men like my father, for
instance! They get the idea that God’s a whole lot like themselves. They
think he’s got the time and patience to go sneakin’ around watching for
folks doing things they’ve been told not to do. But somehow, when I lie
out in a boat like this and think about the stars, I sort of see things
different. Myself, for instance. And the minute I go back home and
listen to Pa, I get my proportion all twisted. My sins are all big and
important again.”
“But the Bible says the hairs of our heads have all got numbers on ’em,”
I defended. “And no one goes out and shoots an English sparrow but what
God sees it when it starts kicking.”
“I don’t believe it, Billy! Because if God did know the numbers of the
hairs on everybody’s heads, what good would it do Him? And what if He
does know when some one shoots a few birds? What’s the use of Him losing
sleep over tiny, foolish things like those when it’s lots more important
to keep that frail, pretty evening star hung up there in space? Seems to
me there’s too many folks want to make God a cranky old man, always
finding fault with people because they don’t do things His way—or a
bookkeeper like old Joe Nevins at the knitting mills who almost wrecks
the place if he finds two cents off in his balance.”
“And what kind of a person do you think God is? You believe there is a
God, don’t you?”
“I like to think God would be a kind old man. His eyes would laugh when
people take Him so serious, and think He’s as fussy as themselves. And
He’d have long white whiskers that it’d be lots of fun to pull—so long
as it didn’t hurt Him—much.”
“I’m glad you believe there is a God anyway,” I told Nathan, shocked
with the _lèse-majesté_.
“Oh, I don’t know. I haven’t said I really do yet. Oh, Billy—we don’t
know nothing about Him—not a single thing! Then why is it we keep
fooling ourselves that we do? Why not be honest and say we don’t? If
there is a God, don’t you suppose He’s wise enough and big enough so He
knows we don’t know nothing about Him? Why is it such a sin to refuse to
take everything on faith, like old Doctor Dodd is always shouting about,
on Sundays? We don’t think it’s any terrible crime to ‘want to be shown’
in business or science. Why should it be in religion? If we’re honest
and ready to believe the right thing when we’re shown it is the right
thing, why shouldn’t that be enough?”
“You can search me!” I answered.
“Well,” continued Nathan, “I don’t know there is a God—and if there is
and He’s Pa’s kind of God, I don’t want anything to do with Him. And if
He isn’t Pa’s kind of God, then Pa’s all wrong about all the other
things. And if Pa’s all wrong in the other things, then he doesn’t know
what he’s talking about in the first place and I’m not obliged to
believe him in anything. Oh, Billy, I wish I could live in a world that
would just be honest! I wish I could live in a world where people were
brave enough to come right out and confess they don’t know
anything—about God and religion, I mean,—but were willing to be shown.”
“Don’t you believe in the church and the Cross and everything,—and Jesus
Christ?”
“I don’t know what I believe,” Nat repeated angrily. “And I don’t
believe any one else does, either, if they’d be honest. I’m sick of
being ordered to believe things whether I do or not!”
“But if you don’t believe in the church and the Cross and everything,
you’ll go to hell. The Bible says so.”
“I don’t believe there is a hell,” snapped Nathan. “Everybody tells us
hell’s a place where the wicked burn forever and ever. Who’s the
wickedest man in this town?”
“Why, Jake Pumpton over on the East Road, I guess. Or Mr. Gridley, he
swears so much!”
“All right! Say any one of them! Now then, you know how hot the furnace
fire is at the tannery in the winter? Never mind how rotten and wicked
old Pumpton or Gridley are, could you shove ’em into that fire and see
’em writhe and shriek and burn?”
“No!” I protested weakly.
“Then you’re more kind and merciful than God. Yet you’re only human.
According to the Bible, God’s worse than you. Because He would! Could
you love anybody who’d shove a live man into the tannery furnace? No—of
course you couldn’t! And if God does things like that, you couldn’t love
Him and neither could I or any one, never mind how much you swore you
could—or did! They’re lying when they say so! I’d hate and loathe a God
like that—who’d even allow such a place. And I’m not afraid to say so,
either. So I don’t believe there’s any hell because the kind of God who
made that pretty evening star couldn’t roast folks alive any more than
you or I.”
“Well, that takes an awful load off my mind, to know there ain’t a
hell,” I declared. “Because there’s lots of things I like about Mr.
Pumpton and Mr. Gridley even if they are Lost Souls.”
Suddenly Nat made a gesture of despair:
“Why? Why? Why—are we sent into this world, Billy? When we weren’t asked
if we wanted to come into it in the first place, why are we scared and
pounded and prohibited and lambasted, day after day and year after year,
made to work, or get sick, or get well, or die—and so long as we say
things with our mouths—we’ll be saved, and if we’re honest and won’t say
’em, we’ll be sent to roast in everlasting fire. Why is it, Billy? Why
is it?”
I couldn’t answer. Of course I couldn’t answer. But I fancy that ghosts
of the Pharaohs heard and echoed Nathan’s heart-cry from the night wind.
Isaiah and Socrates and Napoleon listened and shook their heads sadly.
The saints and the prophets sighed from the far-flung shadows and the
infinite hosts of the dead were in atonement with two little boys
blinking at the stars from a river scow in a New England summer night.
II
On another night Nathan asked:
“Did you ever think about your marriage, Billy, and wonder what day it
would come in the future, and where it would happen, and who the girl
was to be, and just where she is and what she happens to be doing right
this minute?”
“Yes,” I answered. What boy—or girl—has not?”
“A queer feeling comes over me at times, Billy. Somewhere ahead in life
it seems I’m standing in a great church with faces as far as I can see.
There’s millions of flowers, Billy, and soft autumn light is coming in
at a window on the left. The music’s playing so it makes me want to bawl
and everything’s wildly beautiful and there’s laughter and love and
fragrance all around me. I can see that picture awfully plain at times,
Billy. Down the long aisle from the back there’s a woman in white coming
toward me—the most beautiful woman in all the world—really beautiful,
Billy, not because I’m in love with her and she looks that way to me.
That’s my wedding day, Billy—and it’s fine and grand. Do you ever
picture yours that way?”
“Somethin’ like it,” I answered. “Only mine’s in a house at night so my
w-w-wife and I can sneak off in the dark and not get our hats busted
with old shoes. They threw shoes at Matty Henderson’s weddin’ and broke
the windows in the hack and the horses ran away and tipped over a banana
stand.”
III
Edith Forge was growing along with Nathan, but saucer-eyed and awkward.
At school they nicknamed her “Yard-sticks” and the insinuation made her
furious. Nevertheless, despite her ungainliness, she was the worst
“boy-struck” girl in town.
The day that she was twelve and Johnathan came upon her giggling with an
unknown boy in an empty Sunday-school room, the sex prohibition went
promptly into effect for Edith also. But between Nathan and his sister
was this difference: a certain sense of self-discipline and proclivity
toward law, order and obedience, strong in the boy, was utterly lacking
in the girl. She possessed instead a “terrible temper.” She didn’t
propose to forego the most interesting subject on earth, Boys, not a
little bit. She “had a tantrum” and for the first and only time in her
life Johnathan Forge thrashed her. Thereupon—when the neighborhood had
been duly edified and quieted—Edith went promptly into illicit alliance
with the brother.
“You help me to sneak out and I’ll help you!” she bargained.
In her studies, Edith had the academic mentality of a child of eight.
But at thirteen she knew how to dance better than that “questionable”
Miss La Mott, the village teacher. And at fourteen Edith was insisting
that school would never do her any good anyhow, and she wanted to go to
work “sticking eight-point” in the local newspaper office “to buy
herself some rags that looked decent.”
Her mother prevailed upon her to stay in school by the compromise of
filching money from the father’s trousers after he had retired. They
tore holes in the man’s pockets so he would believe he lost the money.
The petty loot went to purchase ribbons, waists, high-heeled shoes and
two-dollar bouquets from Higgins’s greenhouse for Edith to wear to
twenty-five-cent parties.
Early in the girl’s life it was expected that ultimately Edith would
“marry money.” That was quite the natural and rational solution for
every conjugal and domestic woe; Edith must marry money.
Not that Edith especially merited the good fortune of marrying money.
Simply that if Edith were thus clever enough to land a husband of means,
the girl’s family might turn parasites and dip their penurious hands
into son-in-law’s golden pile.
It is always a daughter or a sister whom a family hold up when it wants
funds. Never conceded, yet always recognized, when a boy of means
marries a girl without means, he likewise marries her family. What are
blood ties for? Why else have we daughters, being poor in purse as well
as in spirit?
Of course Edith would have nothing to give such a wealthy husband but
her bovine body; the mind of the girl is always a thing passed over. So
Edith’s education, begun at twelve by a work-gnarled, disappointed,
narrow-visioned mother, had solely to do with making her body attractive
and planning what would be done with the Unknown’s cash when it was
secured.
Edith “met boys” at school, she “met boys” at church; she also “met
boys” on the streets. Half the parents in town at some time or other
took note of those clandestine meetings and opined wrathfully, “If that
Forge girl was mine, I’d lambaste her good and plenty,” well knowing
they would do nothing of the sort. Because under the jurisdiction of
other parents, Edith’s sex proclivities would probably have been
diverted into normal, healthy channels.
Edith “never did a stroke of work at home.” It was Mrs. Forge’s
contention that daughter must be “saved” from it and not get her hands
all hard and red or her face lined with premature care, or she wouldn’t
be attractive to Money.
So Mrs. Forge “slaved and drudged” and was always too tired at night to
go anywhere or do anything but retire into the front room and rock in
the dark. Edith, like the Dresden Doll, toiled not, neither did she
spin. She fussed and fumed in the morning and was always late to school.
She “never ate her meals” properly at noon, and after school she was
either off on the edge of town, fire-playing with her latest
short-trousered “catch,” or sprawled on the couch devouring Charlotte
Braeme, Bertha M. Clay or Laura Jean Libby. At fourteen she knew more
than most women know on their wedding night and what she didn’t know she
was reasonably willing to learn.
So Edith whiled away the shining hours around the calendar and Johnathan
Forge ruled over a painfully moral household.
It is notable, however, that his moral responsibility to God for Edith’s
soul didn’t cause him a quarter of the fuss he made over Nathan’s.
IV
Of etiquette in the Forge home or manners at the Forge table there were
none. Etiquette was snobbish, “putting on airs.” “Manners” were
something to be displayed largely for the edification of company. The
only time the Forges were scrupulously polite in the privacies of the
family circle were when they were angry at each other.
Mrs. Forge railed at times about her children eating too fast or fleeing
the table without folding their napkins. When they wanted a helping of
food, they were supposed to say “Please” and “Thank you”, and on
quitting the board to say “Excuse me.” But as the parents never observed
these niceties themselves, practice by the children was rather
superficial,—and Mrs. Forge’s despair.
Whatever else may be said of Johnathan, the fact remained that “he did
relish his vittles.” “Good food and plenty of it” was his motto. So it
became a matter for special domestic citation to “see who could eat the
most”, notably at Sunday dinner, Thanksgiving or Christmas. A monstrous
appetite was a sign of health and virility and a distended stomach more
to be desired than gold—yea, than the gold of the caliphs. Roast beef
and boiled potatoes, corned beef and cabbage, anything that afforded
inward bulk, therefore, were favorite and familiar dishes on the Forge
menu.
Johnathan’s favorite dinner pleasantry was wiping his mouth on the
tablecloth as a coy rebuke to his wife for forgetting the napkins.
During the progress of the meal, knives, forks and spoons sprawled all
over the cloth or against dishes, and the clatter of china and silver
exceeded the cutlery music from twenty tables at a church supper.
The mother was ever in hot water because Edith only “nibbled at her
food” and Nathan “washed his down with water.” After the meal, like a
gorged python, Johnathan leaned back and picked and prodded his mouth
for five or ten minutes with a huge toothpick.
In allied domestic functions the Forges followed suit. Sometimes on
Saturday nights the family bathed. Sometimes it did not bathe. It all
depended on whether Mrs. Forge was energetic enough to “heat the water.”
The household ran on no schedule. Nothing could be kept in its place
because nothing had a place in which it could be kept. Edith
particularly was the worst offender. Her bedroom resembled the pathway
of a Missouri cyclone through a rummage sale until her mother “found
time to pick up”, about once in two or three weeks.
Clothes and shoes were bought and worn until they were worn out. Then
more were grudgingly bought and worn until they were worn out also.
Excepting Edith’s.
Johnathan boasted—mostly to his wife and children that he and his family
were solid and substantial; you always knew “just where to find him.” No
stuck-up notions or fancy fairs to the Forges. People like themselves
were the backbone of the nation.
V
Once, at Christmas, the children, imbued with the holiday spirit, wanted
a tree. A tree was easily procured by Nathan and hauled home on his
sled. Mrs. Forge and Edith strung popcorn and made paper chains.
Johnathan, in a spirit of holiday generosity, gave his wife five
dollars. The children got a dollar apiece with which to buy presents.
Mrs. Forge bought a much-needed underskirt with most of her money,
knitting the children mufflers and keeping her purchases down to a few
pathetic gifts in the local “five-and-ten.” She searched long for a gift
for Johnathan. She finally chose a little painted picture of a scene in
the Bay of Naples, Vesuvius smoking in the background. She said it was
“so pretty.” The gifts made a rather thin exhibit on the tree.
Christmas morning, when the tree was denuded, Johnathan got his picture,
opened it, threw back his head and roared.
Mrs. Forge had hunted a long time for Johnathan’s gift. The little
picture meant a blind, vague, piteous groping after Beauty in her
crushed and maltreated soul. It was “so pretty.”
But Johnathan failed utterly to grasp its erudite potentialities. He
spent the greatest part of that Christmas morning making fun of the
picture. He got a string and hung it around his neck, sandwich-board
fashion. He said he admired his wife’s tastes in frames; he had a
rubber-heel placard at his shop which would fit it exactly.
Mrs. Forge, who had parted with seventy-five cents which she might
better have used for stockings, finally fled the room in tears. During
the ensuing year, the picture was facetiously referred to as “Mother’s
Volcano.”
Johnathan, by the way, gave his wife a new bread board and Edith a fancy
calendar.
Nathan received a small, leather-bound copy of the New Testament.
It was a red-letter Christmas!
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XIV
CONSIDER THE WORM
I
By the time he had reached seventeen Nathan had attained what it too
often requires discouraging years for older persons to negotiate.
He had lifted his handicapped, browbeaten young shoulders above the
drab-colored dead level of village mediocrity.
Fourteen of his poems had been printed intermittently as “boxed”
features on the front page of the _Daily Telegraph_.
The village, therefore, had been forced to admit—grudgingly to be sure,
but nevertheless to admit—that if he kept it up long enough, and nothing
stopped him, and the quality of his verse showed improvement instead of
deterioration, and no one surpassed him, and the _Telegraph_ kept out of
bankruptcy, and the Federal constitution wasn’t amended so as to
prohibit poetry altogether—somewhere down long vistas of future years he
might possibly be expected to approach a fair-to-middlin’ resemblance to
a near-celebrity.
These qualifying adverbs and adjectives constitute an attempt at
faithful reproduction of the community’s attitude toward budding talent.
Paris, like all Vermont, like all New England, like small towns all over
the planet, was doggedly determined that a loophole should be left, in
fact several loopholes, so that in case of failure and fizzle it might
be in that crushing position to retort, “I told you so!”
To bet on a local son’s ability to rise above the common herd’s tenor of
nothing-in-particular and have the wager turn out a loss was more to be
deplored than a failure of the nation’s credit system. The grocery-store
and barbershop economists could blame the prevailing administration for
the latter, but for the former there would be no one to take the
ignominy but themselves.
It was only natural that there should be those in town who had no
patience whatever with the tone of Nathan’s verse. It was sickly,
sloppy, moon-sighing stuff, that suggested “dying calves with their
mouths full of mush.”
Another element, chiefly recruited from the young, unmarried set, or
Raveled Ends of Might-Have-Been Romances, clipped out the boy’s verses
and mailed them to sweethearts. Or they pasted them in scrapbooks
alongside clippings from the Poet’s Corner in the _Boston Sunday Globe_.
But as a matter of genuine enthusiasm, the bulk of the local census was
phlegmatic. They read the boy’s amateurish little girl rhymes with
indifference, waiting for it to be disclosed “whether that mopey Forge
young one was a darn bright kid or a goddam fool.”
Yet the fact remained that the lad was getting “published.” And every
effusion carried its tuppence worth of advertising. Soon the town was
forced to sit up and take notice. Some of the best of Nat’s work had
been clipped from our smudgy, homely, country sheet and been copied in
the _Springfield Union_ or the aforesaid _Boston Globe_.
That a lethargic exchange editor in each case, hunting for material to
fill odd corners with “hay”, had snipped out the verses with a vast and
pardonable ennui, spiked them on a linotype hook and forgotten them, was
immaterial, even if it had been generally known. Paris felt duly
edified.
The effect on Johnathan the day Uncle Joe Fodder, the town philosopher,
found the first of Nat’s poems in the _Globe_ and advised John to that
effect was as amusing as it was interesting.
John had been positive his boy’s propensity for poetry was in the same
category with his Abaddonic proclivity toward girls. Realization that
fame was being forced upon the family despite his dogged assumption to
the contrary came as a shock. A great city newspaper had printed the
name of a Forge and circulated the same by hundreds of thousands of
copies! What could Johnathan do in the face of such titanic refutation?
Nothing but to glow in his heart that the celebrity was his son and then
treat the said celebrity as his own personal washpot.
“I guess I know best how to bring out talent and ability in a
youngster,” he affirmed. “Keep ’em in their places and give ’em a little
hardship to rise above! That’s the thing that makes men. Give a boy
encouragement and he either gets a swelled head or turns out a
mollycoddle.”
Besides, what encouragement had his father ever given him?
II
Many times in those months and years, I saw the man opposite me in
church or shop and studied him. But there was little to “study.”
It puzzled me for a long time how two such people as Johnathan and Anna
could remain together year after year in any such loveless connubiality
and not realize its prostitution. But of one thing I am convinced
absolutely: Johnathan was no hypocrite; up to the time of Nathan’s
marriage and still more vital events yet to be delineated, the man,
however narrow, had the courage of his convictions.
Separating from a woman whom he had once married and by whom he had
received children—even if not divorcing her—was not only heresy and
against all ethics, but it struck at the very roots of society and
nominated him for the seventh strata of the bottomless pit.
All marriages were made in heaven. That was the Alpha and Omega of the
whole business. The Bible says a man shall cleave unto his wife and they
shall be one flesh, though they fight openly from New Year’s to
Christmas and make the home life of growing children a nerve-racking
hell. You can’t get back of the Bible. There it is in black and white.
And you know what it says in the ending of Revelations about daring to
change one jot or tittle of Holy Writ.
If there were unpleasantness in his home, it was the woman’s fault. She
rebelled against the hypothesis that he was the head of his house, the
arbiter of its destinies, the party responsible for its souls and bodies
to God and State. She spat upon the verdict of St. Paul: “Wives, submit
yourselves unto your husbands as unto the law of God.” She was
responsible for everything wrong. She was “undermining Church and
State.” She was a sinner from wayback.
The man totally lacked the capacity to see himself in any other rôle
than that of model father, husband, citizen and church member.
He was one of those men of whom it may truthfully be said that he took
life seriously. To say nothing of himself. To associate, disport or
enjoy himself with family or neighbors was something he did not know how
to do. He couldn’t have taken enjoyment from life even if he had wanted.
It was rather pathetic.
He was a finished product of his own philosophy and never saw it. His
father had succeeded in doing in him exactly what he was trying to do in
Nathan. Only there were leavening and countering chromosomes in Nathan’s
make-up ultimately working for the boy’s salvation which had not been
Johnathan’s heritage.
He rarely attended any church or village function unless admittance was
free, and on rare occasions when the circus came to Paris and he
consented to take his children, he bought no admittance to performance
or side shows. He taught them to be content with standing off in the
background and “watching people make fools of themselves.”
When by unavoidable circumstance he was forced to participate in any
social function where people looked on, he either did so with an
awkward, clumsy, painful, red-faced self-consciousness, or he “tried to
be funny.” But in both cases he withdrew into innocuous desuetude as
quickly as he was permitted. Thereupon, unless the affair had been
directly connected with religion, he carried away the impression that he
had been a “cut-up” and a “card.”
Once, just once, when Edith had been ten, the Forge home had been opened
for a party. But on that occasion he had not been content to let the
youngsters work out their own social salvation. It had devolved upon him
as “master of his house” and “protector of his children’s morals” to
place himself in the best chair in the front room and preside over the
progress of the affair. It was his business to see that no kissing games
were played, suggest when the children had applied themselves to each
pastime long enough, inject witty criticisms of juvenile deportment,
indicate when it was time for the refreshments to be served and when the
hour had come for adjournment. All this he did in slippered feet, with
hair a bit rumpled and vest unbuttoned. On the whole, it was quite a
responsibility.
Vainly his wife had tried to spirit him out and away so the children
might act naturally and enjoy themselves. Johnathan was indignant. He
guessed it was his house. His carpets were being scuffed out. His money
was paying for the ice cream and cake. He stayed.
His favorite contribution to the entertainment when the children sat
around like little wooden puppets, half-frightened to death by the
Moloch presiding over them, was the demand, accompanied by an indulgent
toe-tapping: “Who can tell a funny story or sing a funny song?” But
ten-year-olds who wanted to play “Copenhagen” or “Drop the Pillow” were
rather deficient in the matter of volunteering comic anecdotes or
rendering humorous ballads. And whereas Johnathan’s repertoire was
rather limited along those lines also, the party was not all it might
have been.
That night in bed an exasperated wife “started in her same old tirade”
and ended her excoriation by kicking her loving husband in the shins.
Johnathan exhibited the black and blue spot to Nathan in the week
ensuing to prove to the son that his father had married a virago. There
never was another party.
And now Nathan, the offspring of a God-fearing male and an unholy
female, was upsetting all his father’s unassailable calculations and
becoming known throughout our part of New England as a celebrity. Just
what should Johnathan do about it? Not being in a position to do much of
anything about it, the father concluded it best to pursue a policy of
watchful waiting.
So matters drifted—with Nathan performing rather indefinite tasks in the
tannery, the vague nature of which bothered his father not a little bit,
but which nevertheless brought in six dollars a week—until the
disturbing young coot “up and wrote ‘The Pagans.’”
III
To speak truthfully, our prune-and-prism community received a shock. Sam
Hod, proprietor of the _Telegraph_, undoubtedly wanted to administer a
shock. Anyhow, he not only printed what the precocious rhymster had
composed but called attention to its moral excellence in his editorial
column that night.
“THE PAGANS
“We bought two slaves on the Block of Life,
Out-crying the bidders all;
Two slaves as rare as the maids of Punt,
White-limbed as the girls of Gaul.
The Pagan bought for the right to own,
With gold that he could not miss
While I bought mine for the right to love
And swapped for her flesh a kiss.
“We pushed our slaves from the auction hall
And drove them along Life’s street;
We jested over their bodies pink,
The pad of their naked feet.
Ahmed chained his to a black floor ring
As butt for his brutal fun,
While I chained mine to a kitchen range
And work that was never done.
“The Pagan’s slave was a high-strung lass
And fought with a courage rare;
But broke at last ‘neath her master’s whip
And pain from her tortured hair.
Now my slave, too, was a high-strung lass,
And so—for my right was clear—I
broke her back with a thankless drudge
And a baby every year.
“The Pagan swore that his slave should die
By slash ‘cross her milk-white throat,
Her body sewed in a sack by night
Be dropped in his harem moat.
I likewise ordered my slave should die
But I did the thing with art:
I ground my spleen to a rapier point
And stabbed till I found her heart.
“The Pagan slept when his slave was dead,
For he had much gold to spare;
Next day he went to the market place
And bought with a better care.
But when my slave had been killed with words
I placed at her head a stone:
‘Here sleeps the one that I loved most dear
While I go my way—alone!’
“We bought two slaves on the Block of Life,
The Pagan and I one day;
But he killed his with a short, curved sword,
A damned, paganistic way.
My slave died too, but a Christian’s death,
And God tells me all is well;
So while white heaven’s ahead for me,
The Pagan must writhe in hell.
“—NATHANIEL FORGE.
“Paris, Vt., Sept. 25, 1906.”
It should not be difficult to understand where Nathan derived material
or satire for this poem. Neither should its reception be difficult to
grasp in a prudish New England community.
“That boy’s mind is becoming positively foul!” cried Mrs. Caleb Gridley
when she had found the paper that night and then dropped it as though it
were hot. “The very idea of putting such a thing in type! What’s Mr. Hod
thinking of? Moral excellence, indeed! I thank the Lord that pure-minded
little Bernice-Theresa is out of town and away from it all. Her sweet
morals are safeguarded from any such youthful depravity as that Forge
boy is showing.”
Old Caleb secured the paper and read the verses in silence.
“Oh, I dunno,” he answered after a time. Then he sat staring into space.
Many husbands in Paris sat staring into space after reading Nat’s poem
that night. A few, however, did not get the chance to stare into space.
“Cost me twenty-five dollars!” growled Artemus Harrington in the Smoke
Shoppe Cigar Store later that evening. “My wife says it was the best
thing she’d ever read and it would do a heap o’ men around town good to
read it, too. One thing led to another and we ended up in a fight. She
made me ‘fork over,’ and she sashayed home to her mother’s.”
Cora Whipple, Nathan’s former teacher, declared it was bizarre, but
nevertheless Literature. She said it ought to be printed in all the best
magazines. Her prim old-maid sister called it the height of obscenity
and gave the _Telegraph’s_ editor a piece of her mind over the ‘phone,
ringing off before Sam had the chance to reply. The poem set the town by
the ears, so to speak.
“You sure can pick out which hubbies love their wives and which women
ain’t happily married by the way that poetry sets on their stummicks!”
observed Uncle Joe Fodder. “B’dam whether I think the kid writ it
himself or whether he’s got some old person coachin’ him. But believe
me, if Sam goes on printin’ the likes of that poem he’s sure goin’ to
swell his subscription list. And not because folks want to see the
report o’ the tax commissioners, either.”
It was old Doctor Dodd who caused the direct reaction on Nathan,
however. The poem—particularly the last two lines—perturbed the old
minister grievously. And he “took it up in prayer meeting” that evening.
Johnathan had read the verses shortly after supper while waiting for the
drone of the weekly church bell. Nathan had luckily returned downtown
before the carrier boy tossed a _Telegraph_ on the Forge veranda.
The father sat stupefied for a moment, after bringing the front legs of
his chair to the floor with a clump. Then as the “coat” fitted him
perfectly, he proceeded to put it on. He left the house without speaking
and wandered through the neighborhood, hands clasped behind his back,
lips set tightly.
Reaching the church, hoping to receive comfort and consolation from the
service in this latest parental “trial”, Doctor Dodd “opened up” on it.
And the father’s blood ran icy cold.
The minister’s subject was “Train up a child in the way he shall go, and
when he is old he will not depart from it.” Every person in that vestry
knew to whom and what the pastor was referring. Every face was turned
toward the ashen mask that was Johnathan’s countenance before that
discourse ended.
The father stared stonily ahead until the minister had finished. Then he
arose and “testified.” It was deathly quiet in the prayer-meeting room
as Johnathan concluded that “testimony.”
Everybody present felt “so sorry” for poor Brother and Sister Forge.
IV
Nathan slunk like a felon through the back streets to reach his home. He
knew the town was talking about his poem. He was shy of praise and
criticism hurt him. Not because it was criticism but because it usually
rested on some one’s disapproval. The last thought in his head was any
back fire at home from the verses. Consequently he was puzzled when on
reaching the Spring Street corner he saw his sister arise from the steps
and hurry toward him.
“Natie!” she cried. “Don’t go in! Run and hide!”
“Hide! What for?”
“Dad’s whopping mad over what you had in the paper to-night. He’s laying
for you good.”
“Laying for me?”
“He thinks you’ve slammed him somehow, for the fights he has with Ma.
And I guess the minister didn’t like it either and jawed him about it in
prayer meeting. Anyway, Pa came in as white as a ghost. He asked for
you. When Ma said you was still out, he took off his things and started
pulling down all the curtains. He shoved back the furniture and went and
got the strap. Ma wanted to know what was eating him, and he said when
you came in he was going to give you the darnedest dressing down you’d
ever got in your life.”
Nathan sank down on the low cement wall which ran around the Granger
lawn.
“And how did Ma take it?”
“Oh, she stood up for you. Not because she’d read the poetry or cared a
hoot what you’d said in it. Just because it was something to fight about
with Pa. They were going it hot and heavy when I decided to sit out on
the steps and warn you. I’ve got to go back before they miss me, so,
listen! You hang around outside, Natie, and if Ma talks him out of it or
he gets winded and goes to bed, I’ll put a lamp in my upstairs window
and you’ll know it’s a sign to sneak in.”
Nathan remained seated on the fence. Once or twice he cast glances
toward his home, fearing to go in, fearing to remain out later. He
looked down at his shoes, worn, sloppy and unshined. He felt supinely
small in the ludicrous suit he wore, an old one of his father’s. His
hands were soiled. His finger nails were broken. He needed a bath, in
fact, it seemed as though he always needed a bath. He felt grimy and
seamy and prematurely old.
He had been that evening in the Seaver home. Fred Seaver’s father ran a
meat and grocery store in East Main Street. Fred was experimenting with
electricity and Nat had gone over to inspect his apparatus. But it had
not been the apparatus which had most interested Nathan. It had been the
Seaver home.
The Seaver home had hardwood floors and all the rooms were lighted by
electric chandeliers. The dining room had a cozy “dome” above the table,
and silver sparkled amid cut glass on the buffet. The Seaver parlor
wasn’t “saved for company.” It was open all the time and in one corner
an open fire burned cheerily. The Seavers called it the “living room.”
There were bookshelves between the windows and a soft-shaded reading
lamp on the center table.
In the Forge home, Johnathan “roared like a bull” if more than one gas
light was burned at once. Out from the west wall of the Forge kitchen
stuck a twelve-inch gas bracket with a single Welsbach burner. It was a
white, cheerless light which burned unevenly. Beneath it each night
Johnathan tipped back his plain wooden chair and read his _Telegraph_.
If the rest of the family cared to read, they “strained their eyes” or
waited until the father had finished. Nathan could not help comparing
the two lamps,—the difference in homes which they represented.
The Seaver home was inviting, restful. In the Forge home, clothes were
always piled on chairs or tables. More ironed clothes were usually
strung on a wire from corner to corner, making the kitchen atmosphere
stuffy. The sink was always filled with greasy dishes. The faucet
dripped. There were crumbs on the red tablecloth and sugar grains on the
worn linoleum.
Nathan had compared the two and wished, poor boy, that he might know
such a home as Fred Seaver’s. He thought of it now as he sat out in the
chill September night, afraid to enter a house where a father waited to
flog him.
Of one thing the boy was grimly resolved. At exactly the moment the law
allowed him his freedom, he would find a girl somewhere and have a home
that should exhibit some claim toward beauty, cheerfulness and peace.
Who the girl might be was immaterial. To flee the horrible, fear-driven,
Scripture-surfeited place he had known from earliest boyhood was
becoming the greatest objective in existence. But meanwhile, what should
he do?
The question answered itself. The front door of his father’s house
opened and Johnathan himself emerged. He wore hat and coat. Down the
steps he started and in the opposite direction from where Nathan waited.
Before the boy could solve the mystery, his sister appeared. She ran
frantically for the place where she had left her brother.
“Natie!” she cried hysterically. “Natie—come quick! Something’s happened
to Ma!”
Across the street Nathan leaped and into the dark hallway. He bumped
into a door, stumbled over a chair, reached the kitchen.
His mother was seated on the floor, hammering her gnarled fists crazily
upon the linoleum. One of her legs stuck out, uncovered, from beneath
her body. Her spectacles were off, her face was swollen—as it usually
was swollen—with weeping.
“She’s having one of her spells!” cried the awe-struck sister. “You’ll
have to put her to bed—or do something!” The girl spoke as though they
were gazing down on a strange biological exhibit.
Mrs. Forge was only letting her nerves go in an enjoyable fit of
hysterics. But it was an epochal fit of hysterics. She pounded the floor
and she kicked her heels. She tore down her hair and ripped her
washed-out blue wrapper from her thin shoulders, leaving soiled
underclothes and rusty, broken corsets exposed.
“I’ll kill myself!” she shrieked. “I will! I will! I’ll not stand it
another day! I’ll kill myself!” She emphasized each “will” with a thump
of her tightly clenched fist upon the floor.
“Doctor Johnson told Pa once the quickest way to bring folks out of a
‘spell’ was to throw cold water on ’em!” suggested Edith. “You better
get the bucket, Nat. Give her a sloppin’—a good one!”
But Nat could not “give her a sloppin’.” He was suddenly overwhelmed
with pity.
“Come, mother,” he said. “Let me help you to bed!”
“I don’t want to go to bed! I want to kill myself! And I will! I will! I
will! Get me the butcher knife! Edith!—Nathan! Get the butcher knife!
Watch your mother kill herself.”
Edith started to cry. Nathan saw something should be done and he did it.
He stooped and picked up his mother. Though she fought and clawed his
face, he managed it. Bidding Edith go ahead with the lamp, he carried
his struggling mother up the stairs and into her chamber. There he laid
her on the bed.
“Undress her, Edie,” he ordered. “Get her into bed before Pa comes
back.”
“I dassent, Nat. I’m afraid.”
Nathan locked his mother into the bedroom, first making certain there
was nothing about the chamber with which she could “do anything rash.”
Then he went back down the stairs.
He was inclined to agree with an oft-expressed sentiment of his
father’s. It was a “hell of a home.”
“Where you going, Natie?” cried Edith. “Don’t leave me alone with her.
I’m afraid, I say.”
“She can’t get out, unless she jumps through a window, and I don’t aim
to be here when Pa comes back.”
“Where you going?”
“I dunno. Just out.”
Nathan started for the hallway. But he got no farther. He met his
father—coming in.
Johnathan made an arresting gesture.
“Young man,” he announced hoarsely, “I want to see you.”
The boy was startled by the strange quality of Johnathan’s voice. The
father’s face was white and drawn. There were puffy circles beneath his
eyes and almost no color in his lips.
“Whatter you want?” demanded the boy sullenly.
“It’s time that you and I had a talk, young fellow. You’re approaching
man’s estate. It’s time that you and I had a talk.”
V
They went into the parlor and sat down in the dark. Nathan was first
puzzled, then alarmed. As the time passed and his father sat silent, an
ominous silhouette opposite in the dark, that alarm increased to panic.
Finally Johnathan cleared his throat.
“I just met Caleb Gridley up the street a pace,” he announced. “We had a
talk—him and me. We talked about you—and your poetry.”
“Mr. Gridley?”
“Yes, Mr. Gridley! You’ve been coming along, Nathaniel. You’ve been
coming along so fast I’ve hardly noticed. But to-night you’ve had a
thing printed in the paper that’s brought me to my senses. You’re
getting too big to thrash. So I’ve concluded to talk with you, I say.
It’s time we got this poetry business straight. I’m responsible to God
for your soul and this poetry business brings home how much. How old are
you, Nathan?”
“Seventeen,” the boy answered grimly.
“Yes, you’re seventeen. And at the wild, foolish age of seventeen you’re
starting out to ruin your life precisely as I started out to ruin mine.
And did! Only I started at twenty-one instead of bally seventeen.”
“Ruining my life? How am I ruining my life, by writing poetry?”
“No! By going contrary to your father’s best judgment for your welfare
and future. By trying to do something and be something which your father
doesn’t approve of. At twenty-one I was in the same position toward my
father—I admit it! My father knew what was best for me; he was older and
therefore wiser. He wanted me to be a business man—to set up a shop with
him. But I had hazy, half-baked ideas that I wanted to be a minister. So
I went contrary to my father’s advice and his wiser judgment.”
“You regretted wanting to be a minister?”
“No! I’ve regretted I presumed to know more than my father about what I
was best fitted to do. And now my own boy has come along and stands
exactly on the brink of the same horrible precipice. I’d have thanked my
father if he’d broken my neck for my independence. I’m not going to do
that to you. But I want to show you the hideous mistake you’re making.
Nathaniel, I want to save you from frittering away your life being any
such puerile, willy-nilly thing as a poet!”
“But I like being a writer! I could do something big!”
“Stop! I’m doing the talking! You like to write poems, yes. And some men
like to drink whisky and smoke cigarettes. But this isn’t a world in
which we can pamper ourselves in the things we like to do. It’s a world
in which we’ve got to school ourselves in stiff self-discipline—do the
things we don’t like to do. Always! The moment a boy or a man goes doing
something he likes to do, he’s guilty of a weakness—of a sin!—and sin is
displeasing in the sight of the Heavenly Father. The Bible says so!”
“But if I can’t write, what do you want I should do?”
“The Bible says, ‘By the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread,’
Genesis, third chapter, nineteenth verse. That means a man’s chief
concern in this world is work, business. All other things come second to
work, business. A man should first of all have a trade, succeed in a
good business, make money. After he’s done these things, then perhaps he
can waste a little time with foolishness like poetry. But to put the
poetry nonsense first,—that’s the cart before the horse; that’s to court
failure, poverty, all the hardships I’ve had to endure, wanting to be a
minister before I knew my own mind—_marrying your mother_! And I’ve
decided I don’t intend to see you do it. As you’re not old enough to
make up your own mind yet, it’s my duty to make it up for you. But I
want you to see why and how it’s done. Twenty years from to-night, on
your bended knees, with tears in your eyes, you’ll kiss my hand and
thank me—just as you’re going to thank me some day for keeping you from
girls or setting you to work in the tannery—having that valuable
experience in contacting with unpleasant things.”
“Pa!” cried the aghast boy. “You’re not going to say I can’t write any
more poetry!”
“I’m going to say you can’t write any more poetry until you know your
own mind. What you’ve written in to-night’s paper goes to show the
injury an immature, undisciplined boy can do to himself and to those who
love him—by not knowing his own mind. All over this town to-night
sensible people are reading your poetry. They’re laughing at you and
pitying you. But they’re damning me as your father for not keeping a
guiding hand on you, training your thoughts and impulses into healthy,
money-making channels. To-night in the House of God I hung my head in
shame for the thing my son had done. Even a minister of the Gospel
rebuked me before the Elders in the Temple. And that shame, your shame
as well as mine, is almost greater than I can bear. It can’t be
duplicated, young man. It’s got to stop before you do something far more
sickening.”
“But, Pa! I like to write poetry! It comes so easy——”
“Who are you—little, inconsequential, immature Nathaniel Forge—that you
should consider yourself capable or talented enough to go before the
public with your silly little rhymes? What do you know about life and
its responsibilities and penalties—merely living here in this quiet,
sheltered, comfortable home with your dear father and mother and little
sister? Hasn’t it yet dawned on your brazen little brain that all the
great poets have been men of mature intellect and venerable
years—Longfellow, Tennyson, Whittier—what were they but bent beneath the
weight of time, with gray heads and flowing beards——?”
“Bryant wrote ‘Thanatopsis’ at eighteen!” flashed Nathan. “And it’s one
of the biggest poems in the English language!”
“Don’t argue!” roared Johnathan, his temper rising. “‘Harken to my
counsel and give heed to my understanding!’ I’m talking for your own
best interest.”
“Hang it all, Pa, I don’t care about business! I don’t take to
money-making at all!”
“Then all the more reason why you should be made to take to
money-making—correct a weakness in your character. Making money, doing
business, is fine and manly and virile. But is there anything fine and
manly and virile about wasting your time on silly, obscene lines of
rhymes—that start a whole town laughing at you and pointing the finger
of scorn at your father? Answer me, sir! Answer me!”
“I don’t know what to answer. You cut all the solid ground out from
under me. I thought I’d found something I could be a success in, if I
did it long enough. But you throw me all up in the air. I don’t know
what I want to be, or what I want to aim for, at all!”
“That’s God speaking to you, my boy—telling you you’re not old enough
nor wise enough yet to decide such matters for yourself. That’s why boys
are given fathers—to decide for them. The proper and commendable conduct
for a boy is to be meek and docile and humble, to accept the dictates
and judgments of those who are wiser and older. The Bible says, ‘Blessed
are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth!’—Matthew, fifth chapter,
fifth verse. All great men are meek men. They efface themselves. They
harken to those more learned and venerable—not ram about the world
trying to poke their half-digested opinions at people, especially at
seventeen. And in poetry!”
“I suppose I should have been meek when Si Plumb made me the
laughing-stock of the tannery crowd that day? Let him walk all over me.
You said then you were glad I’d showed some starch——”
“Young man, we’ll not make this an argument! Standing up for your rights
in a fist fight is a far different matter than trying to show you are
somebody in print, before you’ve reached your majority. Besides, if you
hadn’t been drooling around with poetry that day, you wouldn’t have got
yourself into that fight in the first place!”
Nathan had difficulty in following his father’s logic excepting that
Johnathan had decided he did not care to have his boy a poet,—at least
at present. Tears welled in his eyes. He pillowed his head wearily on
his arm.
“Hang it all, Pa! It seems as if Life’s getting to be nothing but a
regular fog. I feel as if I were groping my way around in it—not being
able to see much sun—bumping into all sorts of things—not knowing which
way to go to get out, or reach any special place. I’m just blundering
around and around and around and—oh, what’s the use?”
“All the more reason why you should listen to your loving father’s
counsel. I’ve been through the mill of experience. I want to save you
from going through it, too—making all my hideous, horrible mistakes.”
“But you haven’t made a success of your own life, Pa! Then how can you
tell me what to do, when you haven’t been able to do it yourself?”
“Be careful, young man! No impudence! I’m older than you and therefore
must know better.”
A long, strained silence followed. Finally came Nathan’s voice.
“Father!”
“Yes, my son?”
“I’m not going to do it!”
“You’re not going to do what?”
“Stop writing!”
Johnathan Forge could scarcely believe his ears. For a quarter moment he
sat rigid, hardly seeming to breathe.
“What say? What say?” he gasped weakly.
“I’m not going to promise to stop writing poetry—nothing of the sort!
I’ve got a hunch for it, if I am blundering around in a fog. But
somewhere, sometime, I’ll find my way out. I know I’m not the kind of
son you wish you’d had. Edith’s not the kind of daughter or mother isn’t
the kind of wife, either. But I’m me and I’m going to keep trying.
Nobody’s going to stop me—and——”
“You saucy young pup! You saucy young pup!”
“I’m not saucy! I’m honest. I’m giving you a fair, square answer——”
“I’ll flog you within an inch of your life!”
“Don’t do it, dad! It’ll only make things worse.”
There was a queer ring in the boy’s voice. Johnathan was so totally and
completely taken aback he was weak all over. His own son!—in his own
house!—openly defying him!—declaring bluntly and boldly that he, the
father, was not to have perfect obedience in all things.
“My son, don’t have me call down the curse of God upon you! It will
follow you all the days of your life.”
“You don’t have to call down anything, Pa. You’re trying to make me give
up the only thing I know how to do and do well. You haven’t any right to
do it. I know you haven’t. I _feel_ it. I can write good enough to get
published. So I’m going on. I don’t believe you know what’s good for me
at all, or you wouldn’t ask it. Instead of helping me in the fog, you’re
only making it worse.”
“You miserable, little——”
“I’m going to be twenty-one in just four years more. I’m going to boss
my own life then. You can lick me now if you want. But if you do—for
just wanting to keep on with the thing I can do best and easiest and
like to do—I’ve pretty near made up my mind I’m going to run away—where
you can’t find me till I’m twenty-one. And I’m never coming back.”
“God’s curses——”
“I don’t believe God curses any one, Pa. He’s too busy running the stars
and suns and—heaven—to care whether I like poetry or you want me to be a
business man.”
“And you’d—stand up to your father—like this——?”
“When I don’t think I’ve done any wrong, yes.”
“I’ll thrash you——”
“All right, Pa. Only to-morrow morning I won’t be here. You’ll never do
it again.”
“I’ll have the law on you and fetch you back!”
“The law’ll never know where I am—to fetch me back.”
For the first time, Johnathan stood checkmate. That queer, hard ring in
his incorrigible son’s voice told him subconsciously that he was close
to the end of seventeen years of bullying.
Such a thing had never happened before. His wife had fought with him,
indeed, but it had always been a “chewing match.” Though he had never
struck her, the fact remained that he could strike her and beat her up
thoroughly, if he chose. He had a feeling, however, that if he went
beyond a certain point with Nathan, the devil had hold of his son’s soul
just hard enough so that Johnathan might encounter the distressing
predicament of not being able to come off victor. Nathan had whipped the
Plumb fellow. The Plumb fellow was larger than Johnathan. In popular
parlance, Johnathan was rather “up against it.”
The father did a strange thing. He arose abruptly, turned and walked
from the room. Nathan heard him pass through the hall, out the front
door, across the veranda and down the steps.
Why had he gone? Where was he headed? This silent, abrupt, unexplained,
ominous departure unnerved the lad more than any commencement of fistic
hostilities.
Johnathan Forge did not return that evening. All that night he walked
the streets, debating whether he should call down God’s curses on his
boy. He actually believed that if he did, the son’s life would be
blasted forever. Morning came cold and gray and clammy across the
eastern hills.
But in the morning the Forge household resumed the even tenor of its
way. Only Johnathan did not speak to his son for four days and then only
on matters of absolute necessity.
Nathan, however, had made a discovery. This is a world in which people
suffer and endure exactly what they choose to suffer and not much more.
When the worm turns, ninety per cent. of the early birds turn also.
As a discovery, it opened many prolific possibilities.
VI
Johnathan, on that night’s walk, however, had determined upon a maneuver
and reached a great decision.
If he could not control his son by scoring his body with a harness tug
for the good of his soul, he would employ tact and discretion. In order
to save his son from a horrible life of poetry, he would get into some
business, ostensibly of a manufacturing nature, which might grip his
boy’s interest as his own, and set up an industrial counter-irritant to
poetic pathology.
If Nathan hadn’t written that Pagan poem and set his father by the ears,
Johnathan would never have gone into business and taken Nathan with him.
And if he had not gone into business and taken Nathan with him, all the
course of the boy’s life would have been changed.
Viewed from the perspective of the present, truly it was a happy
stroke,—writing that Pagan poem.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XV
VALLEY LAMPS
I
Madelaine Theddon was seventeen that autumn. She was one of those rare
girls who seem to slip subtly into maturity while contemporaries of
equal age are giggling over pimply-faced lovers, locking themselves away
in bedrooms to indite silly _billet-doux_, sighing over novels or
clandestinely “putting up their hair.”
On an afternoon in mid-September she had climbed Mt. Tom with a party of
schoolmates older than herself in nothing but years. They had
accidentally (?) encountered college boys from Amherst. They lunched,
flirted, drank and danced in the great, airy Summit House.
Madelaine was an accomplished dancer because of her litheness and
exquisite grace of carriage. Yet to-day she had not cared for dancing.
“Old Mother Hubbard” the boys often nicknamed her,—and left her alone.
It was increasingly difficult for Madelaine to endure the crudities and
vaporings of slangy, big-footed adolescence. They had left her much
alone to-day.
She stole down the deck-like Summit House verandas, one by one, down the
weather-mellowed and unpainted steps, and wandered off to the lower
point of ledge at the south of that summit plateau. The Connecticut
valley was far-flung at her feet, already hazy with dew-fog and
twinkling with the first lamps of evening.
Hushed, peaceful, lofty, that place was,—serene, like the hour. The
western afterglow was dying into lead. The sky—always finer and vaster
from a mountain height—seemed a mammoth arch of sapphire porcelain where
a low-hung evening star in the clear southwest shared ephemeral honors
with a chaste new moon.
Madelaine stood for a time with her figure in silhouette against the
south, far out on the point of rock, raised in spirit above the world.
The night wind, warm and river-moistened, blew up from vistaed lowlands,
rippled her accordion skirt and raised pretty havoc with her hair. Her
hands were thrust in the pockets of her sweater-coat, a sinuous
protection of old-rose silk. She drank deeply of the night wind. She was
thankful for the solitude.
The world was very beautiful in these first clear hours of early
evening. She sank down after a time on the rock, gathering skirts about
fragile ankles. She rested an elbow on a knee, a cheek in a shapely
hand. And fancy wandered.
Faint, disturbing yearnings had throbbed in the girl’s body of late—her
hunger for an Unknown Something was gradually changing—assuming
a different aspect. There were times when she wanted to
love—overwhelmingly—every one and everything in the world. Then she
hated the world for its crudities and shrank from the monstrosities
which shocked her on every hand.
Why did people remark—and keep on remarking—that she was “different”?
Wherein was she different?
In so far as her school life developed, she played tennis, gave
chafing-dish parties, went canoeing and handled the canoe herself, was
officer and active worker in most of the school societies. She was
versatile without being prodigal. Yet through all her activities ran
that same thread of dark-eyed observation,—poise, self-conservation
without repression, the intuitive ability to be ever the spectator while
also the participant.
The other girls frankly “did not know what to make of her.” Yet when
they were in difficulty or desired help on matters they were restrained
from carrying to their elders, they sought out Madelaine Theddon as
straight as a homing bee.
Up and down the slope at her left, the mountain cable-cars kept steep
and endless shuttling. At her feet the serried lights of Holyoke
Highlands brightened. Far to the south the concentration of radiance she
knew to be Springfield glowed clearer on the horizon. Yet none of these,
nor the stars, nor the fresh new moon, held the attraction of those dots
of brave, optimistic twinkle where isolated homes were scattered upon
the face of a night-shrouded valley floor. Was that it—the thing that
troubled her—the lights of other people’s homes?
She did not wonder that heaven was peaceful, that God could be calm and
omnipotent, high above the world. The spot and the panorama was an
allegory. Yes, the earth was beautiful—very beautiful. She had always
known it so. She knew it now a hundredfold. The pain came from wondering
about her part in it, and of it, even as in her school life she remained
the spectator though virilely the participant.
Waltz music from the Summit House drifted down to her. The world was
hers, all its lights and laughter, all its fine rare things, all its
rewards and fairies. No, the world was nothing of the sort! She was a
mendicant, a Nobody. Always a Nobody. How could she ever forget that? So
her moods played upon her. This at seventeen.
For Madelaine Theddon at seventeen, on a mountain height in the
starlight, was as surely the Madelaine Theddon whom One Man found
gloriously, as the sand-crusted diamond in the Kaffir’s girdle is the
same burst of iridescent whiteness on Milady’s finger at Delmonico’s.
Madelaine, on the rock, wondered about the future, what she should do in
the world, what niche she should fill. At times she felt a wild,
instinctive impulse to attempt great tasks,—build, win, create, worship
vast gods. Then her own weakness, namelessness, impotency, would
overwhelm her. She must be attached to something substantial to do great
work. Some one must have emphatic need of her. In these last moods she
felt that building, winning, creating, worshiping vast gods, was all
hollow nonsense,—tinsel and mummery. She only wanted to complement. But
what she wanted to complement she could not decide, even if she could
reach that far in her self-analysis. She was flowering indeed, but she
was still seventeen.
The evening deepened. The afterglow—even the leaden afterglow—died on
the hills. The stars and moon rode close. Lethe-like, exotic scents
wandered through the upper air, no longer earthbound, soaring onward and
upward to sweeten the reaches of infinity.
She was not in love, not at seventeen, despite encroaching maturity.
Boys she knew, even the best of them, were calloused, independent,
painfully sophisticated young hoydens whose principal invocation to the
opposite sex was “Say!” And yet that restive, insatiable hunger to
complement—the finest, grandest heritage of true womanhood—was gnawing.
Gnawing pitifully.
Yet if she were not in love, love was in her,—blind, wingless, already
beginning to look up through the latticed windows of cloistered
maidenhood, observe the stars, long for freedom without knowing exactly
what she would do with freedom if it were suddenly accorded her. Dreams
came to her in detached hours, vague, breeze-wafted, miracle-laden. But
when she tried to lay hold upon those dreams, make them over into
conformity with reality, the world veered askew. She seemed to abrase
her delicate soul in the enforced juxtaposition.
II
The “crowd”, regardless of proper chaperonage, had to be back in Mount
Hadley at nine o’clock. But the girl stayed there on the ledge until the
final moment of departure. Alarmed companions, missing her, searched the
mountain top, calling her name.
The “chaperone” was a hulking maiden whose eligibility consisted in the
fact that “come December she was going to be married.” The woman
arraigned Madelaine severely.
“... If you ever give me another scare like this, I’ll have you read out
of school! The very idea of running off by yourself and moping close to
the edge of a dangerous precipice in the dark! I never had such a fright
in my life!”
“I’m sorry,” returned Madelaine. “The valley was very beautiful. I stole
off to watch the twinkling lamps.”
“Oh—you stole off to watch the twinkling lamps? Rather watch a few
twinkling lamps than have some real fun while you’ve got the chance. I
wouldn’t be like you, Madge Theddon, for all the money there is in
Massachusetts. Why! You simply don’t know how to enjoy yourself——”
“Maybe,” suggested a snippish little prig who had entered the school a
couple of years before, “maybe she’s wondering who her folks are!”
The prig’s name was Gridley and she had shown a dislike for Madelaine
from the first afternoon. Miss Bernice Gridley had small patience with
the quiet smile that played about Madelaine’s lips when the former
sought to impress upon whosoever it might concern the vast importance of
the Gridley money and blood. “She’s an orphan,” went on the Gridley
girl, loud enough for Madelaine to overhear. As Bernice intended she
should. “An awful nice feller I got acquainted with at the prom last
June told me so. He’s a cousin of hers or something. She was adopted out
of an orphan asylum. She’s all stuck-up because her foster-mother
happens to have money! I’d rather be poor than a nobody!”
Madelaine’s features burned scarlet. A newspaper was lying on the seat
of the trolley beside her. She picked up the sheet and tried to read,
hiding her flaming face behind it.
It was the editorial page of that evening’s _Springfield Union_. In the
“goofus” column the staff humorist had included several verses clipped
from an exchange. When Madelaine’s sight had cleared, she read the
words. Then she forgot the ill-bred Gridley girl. The subject and
sentiment was mesmeric and the catty environment faded.
“GIRL-WITHOUT-A-NAME
(From _The Paris_ [Vt.] _Telegraph_)
“You came to me in my dreams last night,
Dear Girl-Without-a-Name;
A lovely phantom from out the space
That parts our lives, you came.
You greeted me with your eyes, dear heart,
And secrets Peri keep;
I moved with you, with your hand in mine.
Down the mystic glades of sleep.
“We idled long in those glades, dear heart,
The world a purple mist;
Beside an amethyst stream we strolled
And kept that midnight tryst.
The little stars drifted down the sky,
A hush! ... I felt a hand,
And once ... just once! ... came a whisper soft:
‘Dear heart, I understand!’
“I do not know all we said, dear heart,
The night ran swift away,
But all the charm of your presence sweet
Came back from Dream to Day.
It’s not the words that you spoke, dear heart,
That made that tryst so fine,
But that kind night found a subtle way
To bring your hand to mine.
“The tears and toil we may know, dear heart,
Must some day reach an end;
Through miles and years we must search sometimes,
Ten thousand for one friend.
Yet some great noon in the sun-glare bright,
In some vast open space,
You’ll stand, flesh-clothed, with your arms outstretched
And triumph on your face.
“I know few words will be needed then,
Lament nor name nor plea,
We’ll let our eyes speak the message sweet:
‘Grow old along with me!’
A thousand years shall become as one
As heart to heart shall press,
And God shall start all his worlds anew
From that first white caress.
“You may be dark or you may be fair,
You may not have a name,
Though you’ve been sold for a caliph’s gold
That kiss will mean the same.
The soul of man has a thousand lives,
Yet Love has only one,
That leaps alive to the Glory Cry:
‘Dear heart, the trek is done!’
“And so the nights with a velvet tread
Mount softly into years;
The gray days come and the bright days go,
With smiles and fears and tears.
But somewhere off o’er a clean sea’s track,
Each soul’s High Noon is due;
Be strong, dear heart, though the wait is hard;
Till then ... just dreams ... and You!
—“NATHANIEL FORGE.”
Madelaine read the fine-typed verses again and again. An inexplicable,
constricted feeling tightened across her chest. Somehow the lines
frightened her, as though a Voice had come from the void and whispered a
promise close at her ear.
She finally creased the edges of the column neat and true. She tore away
the ragged portions and folded the poem in her purse.
Who was Nathaniel Forge? Why should he write such a poem? She wondered.
She saved the poem.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XVI
MORE ROMANCING
I
Nathan was in love again!
The winter of 1906-1907 contributed two incidents of far-reaching
importance to this account of hectic romance.
Johnathan Forge bought the local box-shop.
Miss Carol Gardner came to Paris from Ohio—pronounced “A-higher”—and
when the boy met her, “to his eye there was but one beloved face on
earth and that was shining on him.”
It developed that for a considerable time, unsuspected by his family,
Johnathan had been “looking around for some good business”, professedly
of a manufacturing nature where the labor of others might accrue to his
benefit in more sizable portions than the cobbling business allowed.
Henry Campbell died suddenly in November. The executors offered his
property for sale. The first inkling Paris received that the town
cobbler had aspirations toward capitalism came via the _Telegraph_ one
February evening. A deal had gone through that day with Johnathan Forge
for the box-shop. The cobbler was assuming management at once.
Mrs. Anna Forge heard the news via the _Telegraph_ also, by the way.
The Campbell Press-Board Company, as the firm had been listed in town
directory and telephone book, made pasteboard boxes. In them were packed
the products of the larger industries of Paris, the Thorne Knitting
Mills, the Stevens Hard-Rubber Process Works. The business was
considered profitable, in a modest way, if expenses were held to a
minimum. Johnathan felt himself especially born to that business. If
there was one thing he emphatically knew how to do, in business or
family, it was holding expenses to a minimum. To his wife’s
stupefaction, he drew eighteen hundred dollars from the Paris Savings
Bank and gave notes aggregating thirty-two hundred in addition. Thus
Johnathan became a “manufacturer.”
The “box-shop” was located on the northern edge of town where Paris “ran
out” in cheap pastureland and cat-tail bog. It was a big ark of a
building, constructed on filled-in-land, two stories in height and
painted a dirty yellow. In the southeast corner, facing the roadway, was
a fourteen-foot room known as the “office.” In this office Johnathan
established himself, and the son, the moon and the stars were summoned
to rise and set at his bidding.
Only the son obeyed, however. The moon and the stars were not at all
affected by Johnathan’s new industrial importance. Nathan was called
upon to relinquish his position in Caleb Gridley’s office on the simple
hypothesis that “his father needed him.” The idea was that office help
cost money. “Until the business was firmly established” (it had been
running twelve years), the boy should be willing to work for his father,
gratis. Besides, there was the need for saving him from poetry.
Nathan demurred against leaving old Caleb. If he had tutored the tanner
in the gentle art of poetic composition, the tanner had reciprocated by
schooling Nathan in the fundamentals and finesse of business until
to-day, down here in 1921, that same education is responsible for my
friend holding down a position that nets him an annual salary of—but
that is anticipating. Old Caleb laid the foundation for all that Nathan
knows about business. If Nathan has gone far and is going further, what
old Caleb taught him is responsible, augmented by his own artist’s
imagination and inherent creative ability. Yet Nathan’s demurring
availed him nothing. Nat bade old Caleb a tearful good-by one February
night and the tannery was a closed chapter in his life.
After six months without Nathan, old Caleb sold the tannery.
There were several antiquated job presses in the Campbell plant, fitted
with cutting dies, on which orders for folding cartons were executed.
But the bulk of the work was done by girls on a piece-work basis. There
were about twenty of these girls when Johnathan assumed the management.
Their average weekly wage was seven dollars. Johnathan looked over this
“organization”, was at once persuaded that Henry Campbell had not “held
expenses down to a minimum”, conceived that if all hands did twice as
much work, half the employees could be dispensed with, and the labor
item thereby reduced just fifty per cent. So the second morning the
“organization” consisted of one lone male to work the paper-cutter and
ten girls to paste the boxes. Nothing was said about giving these eleven
more money. They should count themselves lucky to retain jobs at any
wage. “Twice as much output or discharge” was the cheery motto that
Johnathan hung in his “factory” and he pursued it consistently.
He pursued it so consistently, in fact, that the second week no one was
working but Johnathan, Anna Forge, Nathan, Edith and an undersized boy
with adenoids. The pay roll had been cut from $163.00 a week to $4.50.
The boy got the $4.50. He had to be paid money or his folks wouldn’t let
him work.
Johnathan was so intent on holding expenses to a minimum that the art
and necessity of likewise holding his help was entirely overlooked. The
box-shop girls may have been only seven-dollar caliber but they had
their ideas about slavery, as practiced by Johnathan on his immediate
family. They walked out to a girl and the man with them. Then local
firms began wrathfully demanding boxes.
Johnathan knew how to hold down expenses. There was not a doubt about
it. Pay out no money, whether necessary or not. Bank the balance and
work the family.
Thus matters drifted along into the second week and the third, Anna
Forge trying to do the work of four former girls and Edith doing about
one-half of one girl. Nathan ran the paper-cutter. Johnathan spent most
of his time down in the office, punching out “important correspondence”
on an old blind typewriter with his two forefingers. The adenoidal boy
spent his time out on the back platform clandestinely smoking
cigarettes.
By the end of the first month so many orders had been cancelled and the
remainder were in such a hopeless state of chaos that Nathan, with old
Caleb’s training and the imagination of the artist, saw that something
had to be done and done quickly. As usual, there was no one to do it but
himself.
“Pa,” he observed one noontime, “I’ve got a proposition to make that
will save us money.”
“Go back to your work!” snapped Johnathan. “If we don’t get a gross of
Number Sevens to the knitting mill by five o’clock we lose their
business.”
“That’s exactly why I want to make you a proposition. I’d like you to
turn over that room upstairs to me absolutely and let me organize and
systematize the production end as I please——”
“Turn over the business to you? Have you gone crazy or do you think I
have?”
“—for a specified price per box over the cost of materials and profit.
Let me spend the money as I choose so long as I turn you out the boxes
and have them on schedule time on the shipping platform?”
“Do you mean to infer you know more about running a business than your
father, who’s wiser and older and therefore must——”
“I’m not arguing that I want to run the business! I only want to run the
production. We’ve got an order for fifty thousand Number Tens for the
process works. We’re far behind, already. You’re getting eight cents a
piece for those boxes. The stock costs three and you’re figuring half a
cent profit. That leaves four and a half cents to cover labor and all
factory expense. Will you give me three and a half cents for producing
every box, regardless of how I spend the money? You stay down here and
run the office and have no care but supplying the materials, getting the
orders and collecting the money?”
“No!” snapped Johnathan, “I will not! Get back to your work.”
One week later the order for the process works was cancelled. The
process works announced they were putting in their own box department.
They had no time to waste while Johnathan ran a factory as he ran his
family. Moreover, the knitting mills also delivered an ultimatum.
Johnathan called his son to his “office.”
“Nathaniel,” he declared, in a large voice, “I’ve been thinking over
what you suggested Friday. I don’t know but I’m disposed to give it a
trial. For one week, say—to see if you could assume such a big
responsibility. I doubt it. But I’ve got so much work and worry here in
the office, with this correspondence and all——”
“A week! I couldn’t work out anything permanently effective inside of
three months.”
“Three months? What would take three months?”
“Getting order out of that awful chaos upstairs. There’s got to be a
careful organization planned, routings for the work laid out and systems
installed.”
Johnathan shied at that word “organization.” It meant spending money,
giving hard cash to indolent employees who “soldiered” the moment his
back was turned. But in the end he capitulated. He had to capitulate.
Nathan, with the high heart of youth eternal, set to work. The boy
traded with his father until he made him promise on his honor not to cut
the piece rate if Nathan cut the costs. On that promise the
artist-imagination of the lad built soundly and swiftly.
Johnathan was horrified at the number of girls and women Nathan set to
work at the long tables. That they were being paid piece rates and if
they failed to deliver, got no money, cut small figure. The great,
stark, horrible fact remained that some of them were earning eight, ten,
twelve, fourteen dollars a week. Money was running out like water, or
blood from a wound in Johnathan’s side. So many boxes were being
produced that it was taxing him to the utmost to get materials up to the
benches. Not only were all booked orders being filled on schedule, but
others had to be secured to keep the little plant running. All this was
never once weighed against the money going out for pay rolls. One
cow-like little girl, Milly Richards, had perfected a certain operation
so deftly that she was drawing fifteen to eighteen dollars a week, and
it could not continue!
What mattered it if Nathan had used his imagination and inherent
creative ability to cut corners and manage efficiently until the cost
per box had dropped to less than a cent and a half? That Richards girl
was drawing eighteen perfectly good dollars every Saturday noon. And it
could not continue!
Johnathan awoke in the night and agonized over it.
Finally, while checking up the pay roll one week, the father threw down
his pencil and banged an angry fist on the desk.
“I’ll not pay that Richards girl eighteen dollars a week! I’ll not do
it! This nonsense stops right here and now!”
“She’s earned it!”
“Before she came here she worked in the process works and was content
with eight dollars. But you get her down here and the first thing I
know, she’s run eight dollars up to eighteen. Eighteen dollars! For a
woman! I’ll not pay it. You can go and tell her so.”
“You mean you’ll cut the rate?”
“I mean I won’t pay any female eighteen dollars for six days’ work!
That’s what I mean and it stands!”
“You made a bargain with me for three and a half cents a box. I get the
cost down to a cent and a half and you want to break your promise.”
“I’ll not pay any girl eighteen dollars for six days’ work!” This
outrageous thing had become an obsession with Johnathan. “Why, you
obstreperous young dolt, you’ve gone and gathered an organization here
that’s making so much stuff I can’t get materials or orders to keep it
going! And you want to pay one girl eighteen dollars a week!”
“I should think the proper thing would be to hustle out and put in your
valuable time getting more orders—not waste it worrying over the high
wages one clever girl has managed to make by applying herself to her
job.”
“Don’t give me any lip, young man! I know how much business I want to
do. And you’ve built an organization to do too much! Another phase of
your youthful indiscretion, the same that made you write that obscene
poem about slaves before you knew your own mind and I stopped it. If I
gave you a free rein here, you’d wreck the place!”
“If you gave me a free rein here I’d build a sales force that would find
firms who would consume our boxes,” the lad answered grimly.
“And where would the money come from to swing all that business?”
“I’d go to the bank and borrow it!”
“Huh! I suppose you think banks are just lying awake nights hoping I’ll
come and ask to relieve them of their surplus? Maybe you’d enjoy knowing
that I’ve been to the banks here twice. Each time I’ve been refused, but
you’d still keep paying eighteen dollars to eight-dollar girls.”
Nathan felt that he knew why Judge Farmer, president of the People’s
Bank, might have refused Johnathan money. But he said nothing.
“Well,” snapped Johnathan. “Answer me!”
“If the bank wouldn’t loan me money, then I’d get out and incorporate
this business and put out some seven per cent stock. I’ve got
twenty-five girls and four men upstairs. A certain percentage of work
must be turned out to carry this overhead,—rent, taxes, depreciation,
insurance. It isn’t how little we can do or how much we can do. It’s how
much we’re obliged to do, to operate at a profit. And I’ve found that
figure exactly. Not a man or girl can be turned off without crippling
our output and losing us money by running up our overhead per unit of
production. What’s more, if you cut the piece rate, the girls are going
to get discouraged and quit, or if they don’t quit, do just enough to
hold their jobs. What’s the answer? It’s somebody’s business around here
to find orders and I’d say it was up to you. I’ve done my part. Now you
do yours.”
Johnathan arose, his face pale.
“We’ll go into that some other time, you saucy young pup,” he snapped.
“Just now I’ve got to get to the bank. But I’m marking down the Richards
girl to ten dollars. That’s all I’ll give her. Not a cent more. Not a
cent less! Ten dollars!”
“But, Pa!” cried the son aghast. “You’re not going to cut her this
week—on the work she’s done already?”
“Four times I’ve told you I’ll pay no female eighteen dollars a week. I
could get a man—a man as old as me—to work for eighteen dollars!”
“What’s the use of a man—what ice would a man cut anyhow—if a girl can
do the work as well and quicker?”
“Don’t sass me and don’t argue! This is my business and you’re my son! I
propose to run both in any way I please.”
And Johnathan slammed out the door, fully persuaded that no man’s
earthly trial is greater than headstrong offspring.
The pay envelopes were made out that afternoon, Johnathan getting great
enjoyment from writing the names on each in a very precise hand and
admiring his penmanship with great self-pride. When they were filled, he
took them upstairs personally. “Paying off” was something he always
reserved for himself. It gave dignity to the owner of a business. The
help thereby associated him with money. Finally the Richards girl’s
envelope remained.
“You give her this, and explain why it’s short,” the father ordered,
tossing it across to the boy when he returned to the office. Such a
thing was good discipline for obstreperous youth.
Nathan removed his overalls and went upstairs. He had eight dollars
clandestinely removed from the petty cash.
‘There’s a mistake in your envelope, Milly,” he said. “It only holds ten
dollars. So here’s the other eight to make it right. And Milly?”
“Yes?”
“Monday morning I’m not coming back. If you know of a better job, you’d
better take it.”
“Where you goin’, Nathan?”
“Back to the tannery, to keep the books for Mr. Gridley.”
The girl’s face fell. She was pretty in a dumpish, common sort of way.
She flushed slightly and turned toward the window looking down on the
acres of rushes.
“I dunno as I care to keep my job here—if you’re going, Nathan,” she
confessed.
Then she fled down the stairs, leaving the boy stupefied.
II
It was Saturday night and Nathan went up to the Gridley front door and
rang the bell. The Duchess answered. The boy asked for her husband.
Old Caleb had been the only real father Nathan had ever known. Old Caleb
had been the first to notice him, a poor young slave in an abattoir, the
first to encourage him, to treat him kindly, to give credence and
deference to the boy’s opinions, efforts and dreams. It had been old
Caleb who had kept his spark of self-confidence alive and burning when
time after time Johnathan tried to extinguish it. Old Caleb, let it be
stated now, loved Nathan like a son. As for Nathan’s love of old Caleb,
it stood for the lad’s entire faith in human nature. If old Caleb had
ever betrayed his confidence the milk of human kindness in the lad might
have turned to sour clabber.
“He’s in his study, on the second floor,” declared the Duchess grandly.
Nathan knew his way upstairs; he had been there before. The Duchess
returned to a visitor in the side room as Nathan passed the portières.
The boy was closeted with old Caleb half the evening.
“No, bub, I wouldn’t quit your old man yet,” the tanner advised. “My
advice to you is to mark your time. Always remember that the man who can
deliver the goods is the man who rules! You’ve delivered the goods down
to the box shop and so you’re the real ruler. All your old man needs is
a lesson. You stay out for a week; pretend you’re sick if you want, then
let him try to boss the gang. He’ll have you back—high, wide and
handsome—with a valuable lesson learned in addition. At least let’s hope
so.”
“He tried to get some money at the bank——” Nathan began.
“Sure! I know! I’m head o’ the discount committee. I turned down his
loan. A man that can’t run his family no better than your dad’s run his
can’t run no business—on bank money, anyhow. If he gets sick and quits,
or there’s any way for you to have full charge o’ the business, come and
see me, bub. But your dad’s exactly my idea o’ nothin’ to brag about,
and the sooner he finds it out, the better!”
Tears came to Nathan’s eyes.
“I’m much obliged, Mr. Gridley,” he choked.
“That’s all right, bub. Come ’round some day and we’ll talk poetry. We
was so kind of busy boomin’ the leather business just before your dad
took you away that we almost forget poetry, didn’t we? But maybe we can
ring in a day or two yet. Writin’ any more yourself?”
“I’ve been so interested in getting the shop running smoothly I haven’t
had time.”
“Pshaw, now! Don’t you go lettin’ business get ye too hard! You’re a
poet, young feller, and you got a talent that demands development.”
“I wish I could make dad see it.”
“He’s goin’ to see it one o’ these days. But I’m all-fired ’fraid—it’s
goin’ to be too late!”
Nathan reluctantly withdrew and started downstairs. Caleb came after him
in slippered feet, vest unbuttoned. This sort of thing always horrified
his Duchess. If she could have had her way, the tanner would have spent
his time at home in a dinner jacket.
At the foot of the stairs a young woman was being helped into her cloak.
It was a bright red cloak, trimmed with gray lambskin. She had been the
caller in the side room when Nathan went up.
“Know this girl, maybe?” asked Caleb of Nathan.
The boy colored.
“I’ve not had that pleasure,” he answered. He had heard the minister’s
wife so rise to a similar situation and considered it neat.
“Introduce ’em, Clem,” suggested Caleb. His wife’s name was Clementina
but Clem was plenty good enough for Caleb. She was far from being a
Duchess to her husband.
The woman withered her husband with a glance of loathing, then forced a
wooden smile.
“This is Mr. Nathan Forge,” she condescended. “Mr. Forge, Miss Carol
Gardner.”
“Hello!” said Miss Carol Gardner. And she giggled.
Nathan bowed stiffly. He raised his hand, lowered it, raised it again,
thrust it behind him.
“Mr. Forge has been engaged with my husband in the leather business,”
the Duchess explained largely. Then to Nathan, “Miss Gardner has
recently come from Ohio to visit her grandparents, Mr. and Mrs.
Archibald Cuttner.”
Nathan bowed stiffly again. It was characteristic of him, a habit he had
acquired the last few years, to turn his mutilated ear away from those
with whom he might be conversing. But his eyes had met the roguish,
laughing face of the Gardner girl. And he had seen—enough. She was very
easy to gaze upon.
“If you’re leavin’,” suggested Caleb to Miss Gardner, “Nat better hoof
it along with you to see you don’t up-end on the ice. The walk is
slippery to-night.”
The Duchess assumed a “this-is-what-I-have-to-endure” expression while
Nathan tried to find his tongue. Referring to this girl’s risk of
accident between the Forge residence and the business section as an
up-ending was embarrassing to the ninth degree.
“If I’m going your way, I’d be glad to see you safe home,” the boy
volunteered.
“Oh, that’s so sweet of you!” responded the girl. She found her gray
lambskin muff, buried the lower part of her oval face in it, looked
slantwise at Nathan and laughed that mischievous giggle again.
They went down the steps to the sidewalk. It was a stinging cold night.
The sky was clear, deep sapphire. The full moon resembled a Japanese
print, shining through bare, gaunt limbs of winter-creaking trees.
“I better take your arm, Miss Gardner,” the boy suggested. “You might
fall down at that.”
“Grab hold!” the girl assented.
Nathan slid his hand in the warm aperture between her right sleeve and
her soft body. His fingers closed about that plump arm delicately. The
girl in red and gray, a head shorter than himself, pressed against him
with the usual helplessness of the man-escorted female.
And at contact with her body thus—in that instant—he knew he had grown a
man.
Miss Gardner slipped on the Pine Street walk, whether by accident or
design is unknown. The thing that counted was that Nathan caught her in
time and she did not resent it. In fact, she rather enjoyed it. She
laughed gleefully and turned her small, snub-nosed face up to his, coyly
and viciously close.
“I’m awfully clumsy,” she confided. She did not enlighten him whether
she was equally clumsy when walking without an escort.
This opened conversational possibilities. Nathan averred that she was
nothing of the sort. So they traversed two blocks, Miss Gardner
insisting that she was clumsy and Nathan making it his portion of the
argument that she was not. Anybody might slip on the old icy walks, as
icy as they were around the little old town of Paris. They had a rotten
old lot of selectmen—no sand or ashes on the walks or anything—so on
toward Walnut Street.
“So you’re in the leather business with Mr. Gridley,” the girl observed.
“No! I was in the leather business with Mr. Gridley. Now I’m in the
paper-box business with my father.”
Miss Gardner observed that it must be an awful interesting business.
Nathan observed, Oh, he didn’t know; sometimes it was and then again,
sometimes it wasn’t.
“And what position in the business do you occupy?” the girl asked next.
“Oh, I run the place,” Nathan told her with a careless gesture, as
though running places was the most inconsequential and offhand job in
the world; undoubtedly he could run places before breakfast or between
meals or in his sleep. So Miss Gardner was left to infer.
“Very interesting!” the girl commented. “And how many employees have you
in your factory?”
Nathan was suddenly ashamed of his factory, the size of it. Oh, to be
able to describe it in hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands!
“Twenty-nine,” he said truthfully, with difficulty.
“I’m sure we’re going to be awful good friends,” remarked Miss Gardner
quickly. “I’m so lonesome here, you know, a new place and all.” Being a
stranger in a new place was hard, hard.
Nathan assured her he knew how she felt exactly. He would do his utmost
to see that she was not lonely. He promised it. It really was his duty,
as a resident and a matter of civic responsibility. Strangers must be
graciously acclimated and made to feel at home. That was only ordinary
hospitality.
“I’ve been living out in Ohio with my father,” said Miss Gardner. “But
he married again and my stepmother was cruel to me. So I came east to
stay with grandpa and grandma and enjoy life for a little time before I
have to go back to it all again.” This sort of thing was also hard,
hard.
Naturally, likewise as a resident and a taxpayer, Nathan was duly
sympathetic. How could any one—male or female—be “cruel” to such a
delicious little woman in red and gray? He tried to frame phrases
appropriate to the sentiment but decided the time was not yet auspicious
to give them utterance.
“You must come in,” declared the Gardner girl when they reached old
Archie Cuttner’s house. “I’ll simply not take ‘No!’ I’m so deeply
grateful to you for seeing me home so safely. Why!—I might have fallen
and broken a limb!”
By her tone she made Nathan feel that he had done something akin to
averting a national panic, or negotiating the peace of hemispheres. He
went in.
Old Archibald Cuttner “had money”—at least enough to “let him potter
’round” after a lifetime of keeping the books in the Thorne Knitting
Mills. He and his wife lived in the eastern half of a big double house
at the far end of Walnut Street. Nathan had never met the Cuttners, but
he felt agreeably—nay, graciously—disposed toward them. At least they
were fellow Parisians in the responsibility of entertaining the stranger
within the gates and they were also _her_ relatives. He would cultivate
the Cuttners. Why had it never occurred to him to do so before? Why,
some day he might be intimately calling Old Archibald “Grandpop!”
Stranger things had happened.
There was to be no cultivating of the Cuttners that night, however. Both
had retired, leaving the oil center lamp burning and turned down low on
the reading table.
Nathan followed the girl into the close, oil-scented sitting room
furnished in mid-Victorian and with Larkin soap premiums. There was a
horse-hair sofa, several chairs, hideous with handworked “tidies”, a
sewing machine, a what-not, a mantel holding curios from the four
corners of the earth—and Troy, N. Y.—and an upright piano of two-day
installation.
“Do you sing, Mr. Forge?” asked this siren from Ohio.
Nathan countered by desiring to know if she played. And when she said a
little, not much, Nathan affirmed he also sang a little, not much. And
Miss Gardner “took his things” and hung them in the adjoining bedroom
and came back into the sitting room, feeling of her belt in the back and
primping and patting her hair. Likewise she produced a pair of tiny
pince-nez spectacles and polished them with great care while Nathan kept
his mutilated ear away from her and wished to high heaven he had given
better attention lately to his nails.
Putting on the spectacles at last, Miss Gardner poked her lacy
handkerchief away in her blouse and sank in an opposite chair. She
remarked that it was fortunate Grandpa Cuttner had retired, because now
they had the house all to themselves and Nathan agreed it was indeed
fortunate Grandpa Cuttner had retired, because they had the house all to
themselves, although what they were going to do with the house, now that
they had it all to themselves, remained to be disclosed.
Seated beside the lamp, Nathan had his first satisfactory look at the
girl who might possibly “be his consort and his comfort down all the
future years.” Undoubtedly both would always look back to this night and
cherish it as one of Life’s Great Moments! And to think he was living in
it now—that very instant!
She was a well-built girl, rather small in stature, with soft chestnut
hair and large hips. She had a kissable mouth and a slightly snubbed
nose and pink, shell-like ears. Likewise she had a “You-don’t-dare”
manner that was tantalizing. She pulled her heavy mohair skirt down
quickly over her ankles as Nathan sat opposite her and thereby the boy
appreciated she was very modest and chaste and altogether a worthy
object for the bestowal of his connubial affections. He tried to imagine
that she was his wife already, sitting so domestically beside the lamp,
and came back to earth by realizing she held an open library book in her
lap and had launched into a dissertation on the decline of current
fiction.
Nathan clandestinely smoothed his hair, shot his cuffs, got his feet
stored away under his chair with minimum display and agreed that there
were no masters like the old masters. As for himself, give him Dickens.
There was a certain style about Dickens. Then at the psychological
moment he remarked contemptuously:
“I write a bit, myself!”
“You write! What?”
“Poetry!”
“No!”
“Oh, yes!”
“Why! how perfectly stunning!” It developed the Gardner girl was just
wild about poetry. And had Nathan ever had anything published?
Nathan gave her a blasé smile such as Kipling might bestow on a
high-school sophomore from Racine, Wisconsin. Certainly he had been
published. No one could count themselves real writers or poets until
they had been published. Did she happen to have a file of last year’s
_Telegraphs_ handy?
Unfortunately the Cuttners did not keep such a lexicon of local pabulum
handy about the house. _The Daily Telegraph_ served a more practical
purpose each morning by kindling the Cuttner fire. But it really didn’t
matter! Anybody in Paris could tell her who Nathan Forge was and what he
had done. All she had to do was ask.
The Gardner girl was gratifyingly impressed. To think she had come to
know a poet and never realized it!
Nathan drummed his fingers on the chair arm, tightened his tie, took his
feet from storage long enough to tap a tattoo on the carpet, put them
back hastily, hitched on his chair, remarked it was too bad the Cuttners
had gone to bed, for that unfortunate retirement of course precluded any
chance of music.
Miss Carol Gardner immediately assured him that Grandpa Cuttner loved
music, even in his sleep, and she would go to the public library
to-morrow and read everything Nathan had ever written. In a sort of daze
at thus entertaining a celebrity unawares, Carol moved across and
twirled the piano stool—no one ever saw a piano stool twirled to its
proper height for extemporaneous performance anyhow—and——What could
Nathan sing?
Nathan affected a great ennui as he left his chair, and they went
through the sheet music and popular ballads of the day with their heads
rather close together.
Did he know this and did she know that? It was hard finding selections
with which both were familiar. But this was awful pretty and maybe he
could catch the words. So Carol played the opening bars of “Come Take a
Ride in My Airship,” which was just then going the rounds of the picture
shows, Graphophones and street pianos.
Nathan hummed this initial experiment in melodious aviation and then
declared he believed it too high for his voice. He had something more
negotiable ready: “Everybody Works but Father.” The sentiment was rather
silly, of course, but the tune was catchy.
Between a badly tuned piano and Nathan’s cold—which he had not realized
he possessed until that moment—the symposium on parental aversion to
physical exertion was duly delineated. By which time both conspirators
in this nocturnal songfest had lost much of their self-consciousness and
were “ready for most anything” in the way of lyric and harmony.
Of course it was only natural that ballads of a more sentimental and
intimate persuasion should be acceptable by both. So down in the pile,
which had recently come from A-higher, Nathan found more sober and
touching offerings: “’Neath the Old Acorn Tree” was particularly
appropriate, especially the last verse:
“Out in the golden west to-night I’m dreaming,
The moon shines o’er the mountains, clear and cold;
I’m going East where candle-lights are gleaming,
Again to wander through the scenes of old.
The old mill wheel seems silent, all is lonely,
No loving form is waiting there for me.
In fancy I can hear a dear voice calling:
‘Dear heart, I’m sleeping ‘neath the acorn tree.’”
“How sweet and beautifully sad!” affirmed Miss Gardner. “Death is always
so sweet and sad, isn’t it, Mr. Forge? But then, not so sad as
disappointed love. Have you ever been in love, Mr. Forge?”
“Yes,” responded Nathan thickly.
“Oh, how romantic! And did you suffer a great disappointment?”
“Oh, I lived through it,” returned the boy with a sad laugh.
“But what you really mean to say is that it left its scars on your soul.
True love always does that, doesn’t it, Mr. Forge?”
Nathan began to feel that the temperature of the room was uncomfortably
high.
“I guess I don’t know much about true love,” he returned. “To be frank,
I’ve never run up against the real thing.”
“I understand perfectly. You’re waiting for some great overwhelming
passion to come into your life and sweep you off your feet. There’s
always an overwhelming passion in everybody’s life, isn’t there, Mr.
Forge? How true! How true!”
Nathan had an uncomfortable hunch that the Gardner girl was talking
drivel. So he put a new piece of music on the rack before her.
“Let’s play this,” he suggested in lieu of a lowered window.
They hollered through “The Good Old Summer-Time,” or at least Nathan
did, and old man Cuttner in the next room—the same who liked music even
in his sleep—arose on one elbow in the dark and swept his arm around the
floor at the head of his bed in hope of locating a shoe which he could
hurl at the door. Not finding any shoe, however, he slammed over angrily
and jerked the bedclothes over his head, muttering something about
brainless young cootes who didn’t have gray matter enough to let honest
folks get a good night’s rest, and who in hell had Carrie picked up so
quick before she’d been in town two days?
“And have you ever been in love?” asked Nathan amusedly, as he sought in
the avalanche of melodious sentiment for more breaches of the Cuttner
nocturnal peace.
Miss Gardner played the scale with one finger.
“Oh, there’s a dear-enough boy back in A-higher that loves me to
distraction. I suppose I’ll marry him eventually. But I can’t quite
decide whether I love him enough yet.”
The sheet-music titles fused before Nathan’s gaze and his stomach turned
over.
“Has he asked you yet?” was Nathan’s quiet question. He hummed through
the tune of the sheet upon his knees—“On the Hills of My Old New
Hampshire Home”—as he asked it.
“Oh, yes!” (Long sigh!) “But there’s quite a story to it. Some day maybe
I’ll tell it to you. I’d really like your advice as to what it’s best to
do.”
Nathan felt himself extremely competent to give advice on what it was
best for her to do. In fact, he rather knew in advance what the tenor of
that advice would be, regardless of the detail of the predicament. Music
rather lost its charm after that. Carol arose and walked across to the
window. She stood looking out into the winter moonlight where the shade
was but half-way drawn.
“A girl now ought to marry for love alone, hadn’t she?” was her
question.
“Absolutely!” affirmed Nathan.
“Yes. I’ve always thought so! There isn’t anything greater in the world
than love, is there?”
“No,” cried the boy grimly. “And if more people would only stop to
realize it, this world would be a better place. Happier, anyhow!”
“It’s so good to get a fresh, virile, masculine viewpoint on so
important a subject. Because it affects one’s life so vitally, doesn’t
it?” sighed Carol.
“My God!” groaned Archibald Cuttner in his bedroom. Whereupon his wife
curtly advised him that he was pulling the bedclothes all up at the
bottom.
Carol went on:
“And we can’t see a problem in proper perspective when it’s up too close
to our noses, now, can we?”
“Usually not,” agreed the boy.
“Do you know, Mr. Forge, I think we’re going to be awfully good friends.
We understand each other so completely. And it’s such a relief for a
girl to have a firm, true gentleman-friend to turn to—in such a vital
matter as love and marriage.”
“I wish you could have read some of the stuff I’ve written,” observed
Nathan. “You’d get my viewpoint exactly.”
“It must be very wonderful, Mr. Forge. You understand human nature so
perfectly.”
Nathan thought it discreet to preserve a dignified silence, as befitted
one competent to advise perplexed young women on such momentous subjects
as love and marriage.
“I’m hungry!” declared the girl suddenly. “You wait here. I’ll see what
I can rustle in the pantry.”
Nathan arranged the music in order and laid it away on the lower shelf
of the what-not. He paced the room only to sink down into a rocker,
hands thrust deep in his pockets.
So he had found _the_ girl at last!
Vaguely he remembered a Biblical verse—“All things work together for
good to those who love God.” He wondered just how much he loved God. His
conscience pricked him a bit as he recollected his caustic comment upon
the Almighty in the past. Somehow the Lord was magnanimously returning
good for evil. Yes, he had treated God rather scurvily. And in return,
the Almighty had sent him this great happiness! Henceforth Nathan would
take his Sunday-morning presence at church more seriously.
Nat decided to apply himself at the factory with redoubled energy,
beginning the ensuing Monday morning. What was a mere quarrel with his
father over one cheap girl’s wages beside losing the financial chance to
keep his wife-to-be in the style and luxury she deserved? What if the
Richards girl did get a raw deal? Who was the Richards girl, anyhow?
Nathan felt like offering her up on the industrial altar without a
qualm,—in the same class with the A-higher Unknown.
Carol returned. She had a big fancy plate holding half a layer cake and
a pitcher of milk.
“It’s all I could find,” she apologized. “But I’m hungry enough to eat a
boiled owl.”
Nathan affirmed he likewise was sufficiently emaciated to assimilate
boiled owl, but the cake would be a perfectly satisfactory substitute,
seeing there was no boiled owl to be had at that hour. And so he was
served to a generous helping of the cake and dropped jam on his pants
and crumbs on the floor. Whereupon he was advised not to mind—What were
a few crumbs on the floor?—and as for the jam on his pants, she would
get him a damp rag and she did.
But when Miss Gardner affirmed that she had made the cake, Nathan ate
with a new relish and the fastidiousness of an epicure.
So she was a cook! She could make cake as good as the sample under
present mastication! What a girl! And what a wife! Nathan wondered if he
hadn’t better get down on his knees that night and humbly say some
regular prayers.
Of course she depreciated her ability as a cake-maker. This was merely a
little old mess she had “thrown together.” Some night he must come to
tea and she would show him what a real meal was like. Would he come to
tea?
Oh, well, Nathan might. He applied himself rather diligently at the
“office”, didn’t have much time for social nonsense. Still there were
occasions when it was beneficial for a man’s head to forget business.
Yes, possibly he might squeeze out a night and come to tea.
The cake being eaten and the milk consumed—so much so that Old Man
Cuttner ate his porridge next morning milkless—and the hour being late,
there was nothing for Nat to do but take his departure. Which he
did—regretfully.
“I’m depending on you to help me with my problem, Mr. Forge,” was the
last thing the girl whispered to him solemnly in the cold front hall.
“Depend upon it, I shall not fail you,” were Nathan’s magnanimous words,
closing that wonderful evening. And he walked off with his head high in
the air, manfully, masterfully, to skid badly on the ice by the gate and
turn bottom up with his hat flattened beneath him. But the Cuttner front
door had closed. His fiancee had not seen.
Therefore Nathan picked himself up painfully, knocked the dents from his
hat, limped more carefully down the rest of the sidewalk and came back
to the world.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XVII
VALLEYS OF AVALON
I
It was a rainy Sunday afternoon in March. Nathan lay on his bed and
tried to read. But his book was developing into a love story, weak and
asinine beside the greater love story he felt he was living. What was
she doing; how was _she_ putting in that long, dreary, windy, Sunday
afternoon?
A febrile restlessness ached in Nathan’s limbs. There was a hot,
uncontrollable nervousness in his torso. The girl’s hazel eyes came
between the lines of his story. Her face laughed at him witchingly
’twixt simile and metaphor. Verily the heroine of his narrative was but
a painted bawd beside the diminutive figure in red and gray, always in
the background of Nathan’s mind.
“I’ll go calling on her,” he avowed. “I’ll be darned if I won’t go
calling on her.”
“Where are you headed for?” his father’s stern voice demanded as he
crept softly down the front stairs.
“Out to take a walk,” the son answered sullenly. “I’ve read so long my
head’s muddled.”
“I’ll go with you,” announced Johnathan. He arose from the couch and
started after his hat and coat. Of course this was manifestly and
emphatically what Nathan did not want. Yet how could he explain?
Vague rumors had come to Johnathan of late about his son being seen in
the outlying sections walking with a girl. Johnathan at once had more
“load” added to his burden. For ten years he had successfully “kept his
boy away from girls”, or so he supposed. That was all very well while
the son was a youngster. Nathan was no longer a youngster. He was
eighteen and taller than his father. As his son had grown bigger than
himself, as well as shown an alarming propensity for managing his own
affairs, the time had come for Johnathan to exercise “discretion,
diplomacy and tact”, getting him past the “girl age.” It being Sunday
and Nathan’s restlessness having culminated in a desire to walk, it was
only too evident that he meant to meet a girl. Therefore Johnathan would
frustrate any such assignation by becoming Nathan’s companion and
chaperone. This was the father’s idea of exercising discretion,
diplomacy and tact. A couple of years before he would have snapped,
“You’ll do nothing of the sort. Go back to your room.” But the boy had
to be given a little more leash now. He must not be opposed openly. He
must be frustrated.
So Nathan bit his lip in anger and exasperation, execrating himself for
not sneaking down the back stairs. He suffered himself to go to walk
with his father and they talked about the business. Or rather Johnathan
talked about business. Nathan answered in monosyllables.
II
Perhaps this tendency of Johnathan’s toward sudden discretion, diplomacy
and tact had been partly augmented by the past month’s events at the
factory.
The boy had begun to show a perturbing independence. He gave veiled
hints daring his father to thrash him. For instance, the week following
the quarrel about the Richards girl’s pay, Nathan had absolutely refused
to work, “sulked” was what John Forge called it.
“If you can run that bunch upstairs better than I, that’s your
privilege, Pa,” was the way he had put it.
Johnathan had purposed to demonstrate whether he was to be bullied and
bulldozed by a few spoiled employees and a stiff-necked, incorrigible
son. He had talked dramatically about the sharpness of a serpent’s
tooth, thrown things about the office, stormed upstairs, donned a duster
coat and proceeded to “boss his own factory.”
He had “bossed” it so adequately and completely that at twenty minutes
to three o’clock that same afternoon, the men “walked out flat”, and all
the girls but Milly Richards had been mysteriously missing one by one
each time Johnathan came back from office calls downstairs.
Johnathan said all right! he was glad they had gone—it saved him the
trouble of firing a lot of cheap help whom his boy had spoiled with too
much money. He would hire new and train them as he wanted them trained.
Meanwhile he ’phoned for Edith and his wife to come down and paste
boxes. Mrs. Forge came humbly enough but a dour time followed with
Edith. According to Johnathan she was assimilating altogether too much
of her brother’s growing incorrigibility.
During the next day John began hiring “new” help. It was a discouraging
business. All workmen were spoiled these days, anyhow. They knew their
places no longer. They expected too much money. All the men who
responded wanted three to four dollars a day. No girls could be procured
on a piece-work basis at any price because the cutting of the piece rate
had quickly percolated through the laboring element of the community.
John “took on” old Mike Taro to help unload a car of cardboard and two
rouged and perfumed young ladies who had never held one job for two
consecutive weeks anywhere in our section of Vermont. They were
temporarily willing to accept three dollars a week apiece because they
had “gentlemen friends”, they explained, who would help their otherwise
slender exchequers. But all three of these failed to show up for work
the second morning because Taro was dead drunk, and the rouged young
ladies had been mysteriously warned to remain in discreet desuetude or
direful calamities were liable to fall upon them from unexpected
quarters, chiefly police.
The fourth day Johnathan sent for Joe Partridge, one of Nathan’s
cutter-men. Joe came down late in the afternoon dressed in his painful
best and smoking a cheap cigar. Johnathan took him into the office and
“went into conference” with him. Joe listened for a time with an
exasperating lack of servility.
“I don’t understand none of them big words,” Joe finally confessed. “But
so far as us working folks is concerned, the situation is just this:
Your boy Nat knows how to run this business better’n you. And until he
comes back, we don’t care about working.”
This was flat and frank. Johnathan was angrily jolted.
“If that’s the way you feel about it, you’ll never come back,” he
roared.
“I ain’t so sure about that.”
“You mean you’ll dictate to me how to run my own business?”
“No, but I reckon we got something to say about who’ll fill our jobs.”
“I’ll hire other people to take your places——!”
“Why ain’t you hired ’em already?”
“Because I wanted to be fair and square——”
“Oh, hell! You ain’t been able to get nobody to take our places! And you
won’t be able to get nobody so long’s Nat stays away. We’re seein’ to
that.”
“You mean you’ll intimidate any persons I may hire in your places?”
“We’ll knock the blocks off any one who takes a job here while we’re
out. Yes!”
“You get out of my office!”
“Surest thing you know!”
Johnathan held out for nine days.
“I’m too nervously constituted to handle such cheap humanity as factory
help,” he explained stiffly to Nathan the evening of the ninth day. “I’m
not giving in, understand, or admitting you’re anything but a bumptious,
swelled-headed boy. But I want you to go back upstairs and get those
orders off—somehow! It’s only because I haven’t the patience and time to
give to the manufacturing end that I’m temporarily sacrificing my
principles——”
“The piece rate stands, Pa?”
“For the present, yes! When I’ve had time to study into it, we’ll go
into conference over it.”
“All right—if you’ll promise to keep hands off, I’ll try to get the
wheels turning once more. But, Pa!”
“Well?”
“I’m getting kind of sick working here for next to nothing. I want to go
down on the books for twenty dollars a week.”
“Twenty dol——”
Johnathan nearly fell on his forehead.
“Twenty dollars, yeah!”
“Not a measly penny! You’re having two whole dollars a week now to
squander——”
“I’m filling a superintendent’s job here that couldn’t be filled by any
one else short of thirty. I’ll pay board at home. But I want what I’m
worth and I’m not a bit unreasonable to ask it.”
They compromised on twelve dollars.
The box-shop “help” trooped back exultantly. Nat knew how to handle
human nature. The peak of production was regained in a single afternoon.
Outside, the labor differences at the Forge plant were colloquially
known as “the box-shop strike.” But Johnathan would have had an arm torn
out before he would have admitted any strike. His boy had simply
“poisoned the minds” of the help against his own father and they had
refused to work.
“I’ve got an awful problem on my hands, Doctor Dodd,” he told the pastor
of the Methodist church the following Thursday evening. “And where it’s
going to end, the Father only knows. My son’s behavior is graying my
hair. Think of him having no more filial loyalty than engineering a
walk-out of my employees and keeping them out until I give him a raise
in his wages of six hundred per cent!”
“God will humble him,” the kindly old man solaced. “The sympathy of the
community is with you, Brother Forge!”
III
And now the long-dreaded, the sickening thing, had happened. All the
father’s care and worry and training had gone for naught. Nathan had
taken up with a girl!
Johnathan refused to believe it. It was absolutely impossible, after all
his father had said to him, and warned him, and preached to him, and
threatened. The boy simply couldn’t be such a deceiver, such a
double-dealer, such an ingrate—such a sneak!
And yet rumors persisted. People had actually seen Nathan with the girl;
swore they had seen him!
True, boy and girl had been doing nothing exceptionally amiss, except
strolling along unfrequented by-paths looking rather sheepish and
irresponsible, and acting mutually infatuated. Still, Nathan was
deliberately disobeying his father; he was “carrying on” behind his
father’s back. Suppose the hussy—she must be a hussy—intrigued the boy
into premature matrimony! God in heaven!—Suppose he had to marry her!
Johnathan went icy at the horror of it. Better the boy lay dead in his
coffin. Somehow he must be saved from his folly. Yet such was his
precocity and independence that it must be done in a manner not to drive
him into the girl’s arms or make him run away and therefore cause
another loss of his services at the box-shop. Yes, in God’s name, what
was the pitiable, harassed father to do? He prayed much over it. He lost
sleep. His face grew drawn, and gray appeared in fine strands at his
temples.
Then one Sunday afternoon in April Johnathan came home from a few hours’
work on his books to find the gas lighted in the front parlor and some
one playing on the cottage organ.
The father purposely went around to the rear door. His wife was
preparing supper in the kitchen.
“Who’s in the parlor?” he demanded hotly.
“Only Edith and a friend of hers—and Nathan.”
“A friend of Edith’s—a girl?”
“Yes! I didn’t think there was any harm letting them play on the organ.”
“Who is she—the _girl_?”
“Her name’s Gardner. She’s visiting the Cuttners. She sang in the choir
last Sunday.”
“Anna! Answer me, quick! Is it the girl Nat’s been seen publicly on the
streets with?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps so! What if it is? There’s no crime in Nat being
seen walking the streets with a girl, that I know of. Nat’s got to have
his girl friends some time.”
“But my God, woman! Suppose she compromises the innocent, unsuspecting
boy! Suppose——”
“Compromises him?”
“Suppose the boy loses his head and has to marry her! I’ll see him dead
before I’ll see him make hamburg of his life as marriage made hamburg of
mine!”
“You’ll only make it worse by opposing him! Do have a little sense!” The
wife was too calloused to appreciate the insult to herself.
“I know! That’s the hard part. What can I do? I feel so helpless and
weak and incompetent.”
“Why go to all this fuss? Why do anything at all about it? You’re an
awful lot of trouble to yourself at times, John Forge! Let the whole
thing work itself out If you don’t attach any importance to it, neither
will Nathan.”
“But he’s such a sickly, sentimental young fool! I can’t trust him! I
can’t trust him, I say!”
Nevertheless, intent on seeing what manner of Circe was ruining his
son’s life, Johnathan shed hat and coat and headed grimly for the
parlor.
Hands in pockets, face glowering, Johnathan stood between the portières,
waiting for the music to cease. Nathan was advised of his father’s
appearance by a warning dig from Edith’s elbow. Miss Gardner sensed
something amiss, stopped playing, turned around.
“This is my father,” said Nathan thickly. “Pa, this is Miss Gardner.”
Carol arose and moved over effusively, one hand on a hip, the other
outstretched to Johnathan.
“Oh, Mr. Forge,” she gushed, “I’ve heard so much about you and so wanted
to meet you——”
Johnathan did not remove his hands from his pockets. He addressed
himself to his daughter.
“Edith, your mother wants you! Nathan, you and I have business to
discuss. Miss Gardner will excuse us.”
Edith’s face flamed scarlet.
“But, dad, I’ve asked Miss Gardner to stay to supper——”
“I’m sorry! We’ve got other company to supper. Miss Gardner will excuse
us from supper too.”
At the coarse insult, the righteously angered Gardner girl threw her
chin in the air.
“I’m sorry I’m intruding,” she said. “I’ll be going.”
“Carol! I——” Nathan’s face was piteous with the humiliation of it.
“Nathaniel!” The father’s voice was ominous. “As soon as Miss Gardner’s
gone, come to the kitchen. I’ve pressing business to discuss with you!”
The Gardner girl departed in high pique. The boy’s face wore an
unhealthy look as he came into the kitchen. Edith was already sobbing on
her mother’s sharp shoulder. Johnathan closed the door and spoke first.
IV
“You dared,” he cried hoarsely, “to bring her right here into this
house! You dared!”
“Well,” demanded the son desperately, “what do you want me to do? Sneak
up some back alley with her?”
The apparent impudence of the question was so flagrant that Johnathan’s
temper exploded with a bang. Like lightning he ripped a hand from his
pocket and struck Nathan in the head, an unexpected blow so fierce and
hard it knocked the boy sprawling over a clothes basket.
“Pa!—I——”
“Shut up! Not a word out of you! There may be murder done in this house
to-night! You’re not too big yet for me to thrash, even if you can line
the help up against me in my own factory.”
Despite his white-hot rebellion Nathan saw a facial expression that made
him fear his father. It cowed him. Beside, at heart he was still much of
a boy and the habit of obedience was strong in him.
“Now,” declared Johnathan, “you’re going to listen to me. Edith! Anna!
Go out! This is my affair and Nathan’s—alone!”
The terrified women withdrew. Father and son faced one another beneath
that ghastly white light from the burner sticking out from the wall.
“You’ve been going with that girl—unbeknown to me—you’ve been seen with
her!”
Johnathan began moving back the chairs dramatically.
“All right! Suppose I have! What of it?”
“Then you—you—admit it!”
“Yes. I admit it!”
“Unbeknown to me—against all I’ve told you—you’ve gone with her and now
you admit it!”
“Do you want me to say I haven’t? Do you want me to lie to you?”
“I want you to keep your mouth shut! Don’t speak unless you’re spoken
to!”
“But you did speak to me, didn’t you?”
Johnathan walked over deadly close.
“Nathan,” he said gutturally, “you’re my son—and murder is punishable by
hanging. But I swear if you give me any more of your lip, I’m going to
send you to the undertaker and I’m going to do it to-night!”
The boy backed away from his father against the wall, as far as he could
retreat. He did not answer. He waited.
“Six or eight years ago,” went on Johnathan, when he saw he had
browbeaten his boy into silence, “six or eight years ago I told you you
were to have nothing to do with girls! Not until you were old enough to
know your own mind, became of age and reached years of discretion. You
understood me plainly enough then, didn’t you? What? You may answer!
What?”
“Yes, sir!”
“And all down the years you’ve understood I insisted on obedience,
didn’t you—right down until to-night?”
“Yes, sir!”
“But regardless of the fact that you knew my wishes and preferences in
the matter perfectly, regardless of my warnings, my whippings, my
admonitions—just like you did that picnic day with the Gridley
girl—you’ve deliberately disobeyed me, haven’t you? You may answer me
that too! What?”
“Yes, sir!”
“Then what’s the answer? What is it you deserve—deserve terribly?”
“Nothing, sir!”
“What?”
“I said ‘Nothing’!”
“Nothing!”
“Precisely! Nothing! You can’t lay down a law that runs contrary to
human nature and expect obedience.”
“Nathan—I’m—going—to—kill you!”
The boy never batted an eyelid.
“No, father, you’re not going to kill me. And when you go talking so,
I’ve cause to believe you’re not quite sane.”
It was the boy’s utter calm and perfect poise in a crucial situation,
more than the girl question now, which was making Johnathan a man
obsessed. He wanted Nathan to cringe and be afraid. Nathan was driven
back against the wall but he did not cringe. Neither was he afraid. For
the son had at last looked into his father’s weak, inflamed eyes and
realized that he—the son—was the better man.
Johnathan’s lips moved ghastly before his voice would come.
“So I’m crazy, am I? And if I choose to murder you, what would you do?”
“I won’t hit you, father. But no one could criticize me for defending
myself when any one, even my own father, announces he’s going to murder
me.”
“You’ll defend yourself? How?”
“That remains to be seen.”
“God Almighty——”
“It strikes me, father—and this is as good a time to say it as any—it
strikes me that there’s altogether too much dragging of God into our
family affairs, and mouthing His name over and over is little short of
blasphemy. Let’s leave God out of this and settle it between ourselves.”
On the son’s face was slight contempt. Johnathan moved deadly close.
Forked lights were dancing in his eyes.
“I demand respect and obedience,” began Johnathan in a cracked,
unnatural voice.
“Respect isn’t something that one person can demand of another, father.
It’s something we earn by the way we conduct ourselves, day by day——”
Nathan never finished his sentence. Johnathan aimed a blow for his son’s
jaw which, landed, would have split open the lad’s face. But this time
Nathan saw the blow coming. And——
The step from terrible tragedy to divine comedy is oft but the space of
a hair. Johnathan struck for his son’s jaw. But when his fist reached
his son’s jaw, his son’s jaw wasn’t there. It had moved. With a boxer’s
nicety of perception for distance, Nathan had whipped his head to the
left.
The father’s fist went through plaster and lath halfway in to the elbow.
Anna Forge heard the dull smash and Johnathan’s bellow of agony. She
burst into the kitchen. She beheld her husband for an instant with his
hand and arm caught in a ragged aperture in the plaster. Off to one side
Nathan stood with a tired, amused smile around his mouth.
But there was no amusement in the incident for Johnathan. He had broken
two small bones in his right hand. And all further attempts at parental
chastisement were adjourned for that night in the greater calamity of
broken bones.
“You go to bed!” he ordered his son hoarsely. “We’ll finish this in the
morning.” The father’s face had been ashen with anger. Now it was white
with agony, and his eyes were streaming tears.
Nathan pitied his father. But he shrugged his shoulders and went from
the room. The pain from the broken knuckles was so great that Johnathan
soon sobbed openly. Still, one could hardly expect the boy to leave his
face around to intercept any such blow as Johnathan had purposed.
V
It was after ten o’clock when Nathan heard his father come in from the
doctor’s. The boy had gone to his room to throw himself, fully dressed,
upon his bed. He lay staring out through opened windows at the warm
spring stars. Somewhere down to the south of town the frogs were piping
faintly. Wonderful scents of awakening shrubs and sod wafted in at the
window. The night was hushed, mystic. He was eighteen and in love.
He waited until the snarling voices of father and mother had become
double-muffled by the closed door of their bedroom. He heard both father
and mother retire. The hour slipped on into deeper night and utter nerve
exhaustion brought sleep to his parents. Then he arose and tiptoed
softly across the hall.
“Edie,” he whispered, “I’m going out.”
Edith sat up in bed.
“Where are you going, at this time of night?”
“Down to see Carol. I’ve got to square myself for the raw deal she got
to-night.”
“How you going to get out?”
“Over the woodshed roof. And listen! If Pa or Ma get wise, hang
something white in your window, so I won’t be climbing into a trap. It’d
be just like him to hit me a crack from the dark before I could defend
myself.”
“I’ll do it if to-morrow night you’ll keep watch while I sneak out!”
“Why do you want to sneak out?”
“To meet Tad MacHenry. He’s just wild about me. You oughta hear him. If
Pa won’t lemme have him into the house or even speak to a feller during
the day, why I’ll do it at night, that’s all.”
“But, Edie—it’s a little different—for a fellow to go out at night—than
for a girl to—I——”
“Huh! Think you’re smart, don’t you? Think you’ve thought up a swell way
to see Carrie, skinnin’ out over the woodshed room. Well, just for that,
I’ll have you know that Mr. Turner, the hardware man, made a duplicate
of the back-door key most two months ago. I been seein’ Tad two or three
times a week since February, already.”
The flabbergasted brother managed to ask:
“Then why do you want me to let you out to-morrow night——”
“It’s my nerves, skinnin’ back into a dark house and thinkin’ I was
walkin’ into Pa who’d missed me and was up waitin’ for me. Besides, I
got a good scare one morning when I almost run into old Braithwaite, the
milkman.”
“We’ll talk about that to-morrow, Edie. You’re taking pretty tall
chances for a girl—going out all night with a fellow like Tad. He’s a
pretty smooth pool player and with girls——”
“Oh, I guess I can take care of myself—and no thanks to Pa and Ma,
either. Anyhow, you don’t need to sneak out over the woodshed roof. You
can use my key. But for the Lord’s sake, don’t go sprawlin’ over
anything in the kitchen or the jig’s up.”
VI
Carol and Nathan had reached that stage of intimacy where a private
whistle had been evolved in case Nathan elected to call Carol without
advising her grandparents.
Nathan approached the Cuttner house now through silent, deserted
streets. An arc light on the distant corner of Walnut and Pearl
disclosed the length of the Cuttner side piazza ghostily. Nathan dodged
into the shadow of a big maple before the house and cautiously gave the
whistle.
Twice, three times he repeated it. No signs of life stirred within. Was
the girl sleeping too soundly to hear? Or was she too incensed over the
father’s conduct to want any more of the son?
As Nat stood waiting, wondering, hoping wistfully, with a sudden thump
of his heart he saw the Cuttner front door give way and a figure slip
through. This figure in silhouette turned and remained for a moment with
face close to the door, latching it slowly and in perfect quiet. Then it
tiptoed stealthily across the veranda, down the steps and Carol came
into his arms. She had arisen from bed, dressed hastily and by no means
completely, thrown up her hair in a quick knot at her neck and made the
red cloak cover the exigencies of a hasty toilet. She giggled mawkishly
as she met him. She too assayed this tryst on pique, against her
grandfather. Old Archibald had declared “she’d got to cut out havin’
fellers traipsin’ into the house every night and twice a day on Sundays,
that Forge yelp in particular. He didn’t have any too good a reputation
about town on account of writing dirty-minded poetry.” But Carol, having
heard Nathan’s side of the story, was inclined to give the lad the
benefit of the doubt. Besides, it was spring and “she couldn’t sleep a
wink, anyhow.” A walk in the night was very acceptable. Love laughed at
locksmiths, didn’t it? And think how romantic it was, just like Romeo
and Juliet. Taking care that no neighbors saw them, they went down Pearl
Street hill, out along Adams Street, past the Catholic Cemetery and the
pumping station, into world-old, moist, spring country.
It was one of those warm, sensuous nights which often visit New England
in early April, with the snow almost gone excepting in far corners of
sunless woods, with the ground drying and the incense of budding leaves
and flowers surfeiting the shrine of Youth in the vast out-of-doors. The
stars hung large and mellow and close. In another hour a half-made moon
would find its way through the ephemeral stratas of upper haze. It would
stay clear and fine until early morning.
It matters not where they walked; all the spring world through which
they moved was wrapped into a soft, sweet dream. There were no
distances. Distances were blurred, dissolved in fantasies of mauve and
purple nothingness. Poor, distorted, twisted, perverted young love had
mocked at locksmiths, indeed. But the singing, sighing spring night
threw a mantle of sweet solitude over those distortions and perversions.
The boy and the girl were alone, off under a starlit sky in the great
out-of-doors. And earth was a garden spread in silver and bound around
with impalpable walls of Heart’s Desire.
Nathan recounted what had ensued in his home following Carol’s
departure. The girl was already acquainted with the sordid injustices
done the boy.
“Served him right!” she snapped pertly. “Personally I think your
father’s a little bit ‘off’!”
“Let’s forget it,” responded Nathan. “Let’s just talk about ourselves.”
And he breathed a happy sigh. Parents and guardians were sleeping, like
all the world about them. The night and its hours belonged to
themselves.
“Carrie,” said the boy—thickly, softly—as they moved slowly through
infinite reaches of happiness, deep-toned, voluptuous with the spell of
springtime, “I want to tell you something.”
“Yes, Natie!”
The boy’s arm was about her warm, yielding, corsetless waist.
Instinctively it tightened.
“Carrie—dear! I—love you!!”
He had never said it in plain words before. His heart leaped with the
admission. The hour, the vastness of their freedom, acted upon his
self-conscious ego as an opiate. He was the eternal lover.
The girl hung her head. She pressed her arm against the hand which held
her tightly. Laughing nervously, she returned:
“I love you too, Natie, or I wouldn’t be here, would I? No girl would
trust herself out with a fellow so, unless she loved him—very much.
Isn’t that right?”
“You know you can trust me, dear.”
“I don’t know as I’m thinking very much about it, Natie. There’s a point
where a girl doesn’t care, you know, when she loves a fellow very much.”
They covered a quarter mile in silence.
Far out beyond the Cogswell place was an abandoned pile of
weather-grayed lumber. It was half hidden under brambles and wild grape.
Nat and the girl reached this pile. Behind it the Cogswell wood lot
reared like an enchanted forest, Stygian dark, peri haunted. Across the
road, a pasture of sumach and blueberry fell away to the lower shores of
a choked and stagnant pond. The hour was too late for the frog chorus to
pipe down in this bogland. But occasionally up across the pasture came a
single plaintive note or the dull, lugubrious “gut-a-chunk” of a
philosophic bullfrog. Once very far away they heard a whippoorwill.
They sat down on this pile of lumber, its weather-spiced fiber even more
fragrant than the shrubs and sod around them. Darkness hid scarlet
faces. Nathan took the girl on his lap. Their lips met.
Carol resigned herself with a happy quiver. She lay in his powerful
young arms like a tired child and blinked at him owlishly in the weird
moonlight.
“I think, Natie,” she whispered, “I think—I love you more—than I ever
dreamed I could love any man—even back in A-higher.”
Her weight began to numb the boy’s limbs. Yet he could not disturb her;
she was a wonderful burden.
Hairpins bothered where her head rested against his shoulder. With her
left hand she pulled them out. She shook her riotous chestnut tresses
free and they fell about her oval face like the bacchanal crown of a
Sybarite. The lad bent his head and buried his lips in them.
She was his—his! Such a night would never come again—could never come
again—because this was the first. No thrust-and-parry, drooling
calf-talk; no bids for sex-interest here.
Youth, nature and night were stripped to their framework. For this were
the worlds made and the constellations hung infinitely. For such was a
soul given a maid and a man. For this had a cricket sung beneath these
old gray boards for a hundred thousand years.
Again the boy’s lips found the girl’s. Her left arm crept up his right
shoulder and around his neck. Their lips clung together.
“Oh, Natie!” she whispered. She had no strength.
“Let’s stroll back toward home,” the boy suggested thickly.
The old clock in the tower of the Universalist Church was striking three
when they finally reached the Cuttner gate. In another hour the first
streaks of warm dawn would bring the summit of Haystack Mountain into
sharper silhouette.
“Just once more, dear boy,” the girl whispered as she stood close before
him in the hush of somnambulistic morning.
Arms interlocked, once more Nathan kissed her.
She bade him good-by in a whisper. She tiptoed up and on to the veranda.
The door yielded. The Cuttner household still slept. She waved him a
comradely farewell and slipped noiselessly inside.
Nathan hurried through the deserted town and into Spring Street. There
was no white signal in Edith’s window. The Forge house was weirdly
quiet.
From the other side the partition he could hear his father’s lumberous
snoring, when he gained his bedroom. He undressed and slipped into an
unmade bed as a trillion birds were beginning to awaken and hold tuneful
conversation in a hundred thousand tree tops.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XVIII
ANOTHER CASE
I
June had come again. A class of eighteen girls, graduating from The
Elms, were holding Commencement on the twenty-fifth.
Commencement Week was Mardi Gras for Mount Hadley in a refined,
dignified, academic way. While The Elms was chiefly a
college-preparatory school, many of its graduates were going abroad,
becoming débutantes, receiving no further schooling. So Commencement
Week and especially Commencement Night was a gala time. The little
tree-bowered, hilltop town overflowed with parents, relatives and
guests. Music, lights, laughter and love were as extravagantly
squandered as the wealth of Nature poured out for the sensual
gratification of insatiable summer.
And the Door of Life opened large on the world.
Madelaine Theddon was among those graduating from The Elms with that
Commencement. She had taken a course preparing her for college. What
college and what lifework was coming after had not been decided. She
hoped to reach a decision before September.
The afternoon of June 24th, strange to relate, found Madelaine aboard a
suburban trolley, headed for Springfield. Her face wore an expression of
vague worry. In her calm eyes was dread. This while merrymaking at Mount
Hadley was approaching its peak and no one was more urgently sought
after than the girl whose school nickname had been “Old Mother Hubbard.”
A letter had been responsible. It had been scrawled upon several sheets
of expensive note paper bearing the crest of a Springfield hotel. It was
a woman’s penmanship; Madelaine would have recognized to whom it
belonged had no name been appended. But a name had been appended—Bernice
Gridley’s name—and there was no ignoring the letter’s appeal.
Reaching Springfield, Madelaine hurried to the hotel whither Bernice had
preceded her by two days. It was then about six-thirty in the evening
and a warm summer rain was shining on city walks and pavements,
reflecting the first lamps of evening nebulously. Madelaine called
Bernie in her room, announcing her arrival. Then she went upstairs.
Bernie admitted her. The room was unlighted.
Bernice threw her arms around Madelaine when the door had closed,
despite the latter’s wet silken gossamer, before Madelaine had even
found a place for her dripping umbrella.
“I’m so glad you’ve come! You’re an old dear,” choked Bernie huskily.
Despite the rain clouds and spring mist smothering the city, there was
yet light enough in the lavish apartment for Madelaine to see that
Bernie was in trouble, terrible trouble. “Old Mother Hubbard” stood her
umbrella in the bath and threw her gossamer over the nickel-work of the
shower. She cast aside the mannish felt hat she had worn because of the
wet and returned to where Bernie had dropped into a chair by the window.
Madelaine took the rocker opposite, their knees almost touching.
“What is it, dear—a man?”
“Yes,” whispered Bernie, her voice poignant.
“Just how bad——?”
“Mother’s due to arrive in the morning, for Commencement. I can’t see
her, Madge. I can’t see her again, ever!”
Bernie fumbled for her handkerchief. She had braided her tawny hair in a
single heavy cable; it fell down across her left shoulder and breast.
She wore a Japanese kimono, incongruously flowered, with obi girdle. At
nineteen the Dresden Doll was a Dresden Doll no longer. She had become a
big-bodied girl with prominent, bony features, a small, narrow forehead,
wide cheek bones, prominent nose and weak, sensuous mouth. The saving
feature of her countenance was a deep dimple in her chin. It was a coy,
devilish dimple and had wrought much damage. A type of Mona Lisa face,
Bernie’s—without the Mona Lisa humor.
Madelaine sat motionless, her hands relaxed along the chair arms. She
was very calm, very grave. Only tender compassion lay upon her cameo
features now.
“How did it happen, dear?” she asked. “Do you want to tell me that?”
“No! I want you to tell me—what I ought to do—what’s ahead for me. Oh,
Madge! Madge! I’m so scared I want to die!”
The Gridley girl fell into a paroxysm of trembling, such an ague that
Madelaine leaned forward and took her hands. Bernice was ill, far worse
than Madelaine had expected. Though Bernice made the demand on her as a
right, the girl called “Old Mother Hubbard” was broad enough and human
enough to make allowance. Bernie was a woman grown physically, perhaps.
Otherwise she was a little child, alone in the dark, panic-stricken in a
world of savage ignorance and injustice.
“There’s nothing to be frightened about, Bernie. Nothing. Get it firmly
into your mind and hold it there. We only fear the things we fail to
understand. Apparently that’s where you’ve made your blunder. You
haven’t understood. The secret of solving any great trouble is to keep
calm and poised about it. Remember there’s no human difficulty but what
there’s a human solution. Now, then, what we want to determine first is
the thing that’s frightening you most. Once cleared away, we can proceed
to the elimination of other bothersome things. Just what bothers you
worse, dear—physical fear or the reaction of your predicament on your
family and future?”
“Oh, Madge! You’re so wonderful. I’m sorry for all the mean and spiteful
things I said about you! You’re an angel and a——”
“Let’s not talk about myself, dear. I’m here to talk about you. If
you’ve said or done anything unfair about me in the past, it’s because
you didn’t understand. So not understanding, you can’t of course be
wholly blamed. Anyway, I believe it’s an obligation all of us have, to
give our help so long as people are sent into contact with us who need
and deserve it. If there’s any way I can aid you, I’m here to do it. And
I want you to feel my friendship before we go any further.”
“I guess—I can’t help it,” choked Bernie.
Madelaine softly pressed the two cold hands she held.
“Now then, dear, let’s have the story. What’s frightening you most?”
“Madge! I’ve got to tell you how it happened. I can’t tell you his name.
I just can’t! Don’t ask me why I can’t. But—I just can’t——”
“I know, dear. You love him. To protect the man who has taken advantage
is a feminine atavism since river-drift days, I suppose. I don’t want to
know his name. And I only want to know the story as it helps to show
what’s bothering you most.”
“Madge! It happened this way. One night——”
The rain stopped after a time. The clouds rolled away toward the
southeast. Stars shone brightly. The roar of the Springfield evening
traffic, the honk of motor cars, the purring grind of trolleys, arose to
the room where Madelaine had lowered the upper sash of the big window.
When Bernice completed her ragged story, she was leaning forward,
weeping intermittently. Madelaine was a silhouette in the semi-dark. She
rocked slowly.
“But, Bernice,” she said at last, “why should you do it? I’m not
rebuking you, dear. I’m asking for information. I can’t understand it.
Why didn’t an intuitive reserve and decency prompt you to conserve
yourself? Why didn’t the very greatness of your love urge you to nurture
and cherish those things which lie at the root of it—not squander and
spatter and waste and cheapen them?”
“I don’t know, Madge. Somehow I just felt devilish. I wanted to do
something shockingly wicked. I wanted to get as far away from all the
goodness and decency I’ve known all my life as I could. That’s the
truth, Madge. At the moment I didn’t care. I’ll tell you more truth: I
gloried in it! Yes, I did! I was glad I was wicked—until—until I saw I
was going to face all the penalty.”
“I can’t understand,” murmured Madelaine.
“No, perhaps not. But you might if you knew my mother. Ever since I was
a tiny girl, Madge, I’ve lived in an atmosphere of things that were
‘strictly proper.’ Oh, how tired and sick I grew of things that were
‘strictly proper.’ Mother always gave me to understand I was different
than other children, I was better quality. So I had to live up to that
better quality. It was awful dull and tedious. At times it maddened me.
Mother lay awake nights worrying about her culture—and mine. After she’d
married dad, she made the discovery that on her mother’s side, a few
generations back, she’d descended from a duchess. Being born in a
two-room apartment over a Rutland Quick Lunch and then discovering there
was the blood of a duchess in her veins, she had a horrible time with
herself, and with dad too, forgetting ‘Quick Lunch’ beginnings. Dad was
a money-maker. He never worried much about his culture. Beside, I don’t
think they were very happily married. He didn’t understand her. He let
her go her way as she pleased. Just paid the bills. So in the second
generation, meaning poor me, mother determined the ‘Quick Lunch’
business should be outbred if it cost her a leg. And I lived our royalty
from Monday morning to Saturday night, double doses on Sunday. And when
I got old enough to see how much fun I was missing by not being just
natural and normal, without consciously thinking about our culture every
minute, I rebelled. Madge, dear, why is it their culture gives some
people such a horrible, distressing time, making them miserable and
wooden-like, instead of natural and joyous?”
Madelaine was silent a moment before answering.
“I think, Bernice, it must be because they’ve missed the meaning of true
culture entirely. They have a blind pride groping for higher things.
That’s fine and commendable. But they don’t stop to reason why that
culture should be, what lies at the bottom of it, I mean. Speaking for
myself, I’ve reasoned it that real culture has its base and foundation
in an inherent appreciation of the Beautiful. And unless one has an
inherent taste and appreciation of the Beautiful, dear, and builds all
things upon that, they’re merely apes and imitators. They’re ludicrously
copying the behavior and tastes of those who have. People who do the
most worrying about their culture, as you phrase it, are not worrying
about their own sense of the beautiful and appropriate. They’re worrying
because they may not be aping correctly some one who has the
fundamentals and is letting culture take care of itself. Having no
fundamentals of their own, the imitators, I mean, merely a superficial,
competitive pride, they fret their lives away. They make themselves and
all those around them miserable—acting a part instead of living a part.”
“Well,” continued Bernie, “mother crammed royalty and culture down my
throat so long and hard that when I got outside I just had to explode. I
guess you’re right, Madge; I never had it reasoned out for me why I
should do this or that. Mother’s battle-cry was, ‘It simply isn’t done
by the Best People!’ I got so heartily sick of those Best People—whoever
they were—that I wanted to shriek. This thing wasn’t nice and that thing
wasn’t proper. The Best People never did exactly the things I hungered
to do. And everything was ‘shocking! shocking!’ Life wasn’t like that. I
saw it soon enough. And repressing all my curiosity and impulse to get
my share of fun out of it grew more and more unbearable. I remember once
I went on a picnic. I wandered off in the woods with one of the little
hicks of our town. I wanted to be just as bad as I knew how. But all my
poor little pate could conceive was kissing him and letting him kiss me
as much as I pleased—and taking off shoes and stockings and paddling in
a brook. I felt I was getting back at mother. Though why I should get
back at her, or what I hoped to gain by it, I never stopped to think.
Mother never told me anything about myself. She never sat down and
reasoned with me. She never tried to make me understand what my impulses
meant or why I possessed them. It seemed as if everything natural and
normal was just shocking, shocking——”
“And hasn’t the reason for intuitive decency and normality ever occurred
to you, dear?”
“I never stop to reason things out. I’m not like you, Madge! I go more
by my feelings.”
Madelaine toyed thoughtfully with a tiny gold watch chain encircling her
neck.
“Sometimes, dear,” she observed, “when I think how narrow and
short-sighted and unfair some parents seem to be, I wonder the race is
as clean and decent as it is.”
“Don’t talk like old Prexy Anderson to-night, Madge. It makes my head
ache. I don’t want to know the reason for things. I just want to know
the way out of them.”
Madelaine shook her head sadly.
“And so that’s how you met with this trouble? You wanted to spite your
mother again.”
“Not altogether. It wasn’t mother especially just then. It was
everything mother stood for. He flung at me, ‘Oh, you’re one of those
“nice” girls, are you?’ and it made me wild. I proposed to show him I
wasn’t one of those ‘nice’ girls and the sky was the limit. He couldn’t
fling any such insult in my teeth as that. Then I didn’t care what
happened.”
“You don’t love him?”
“I didn’t say so.”
“Well, would you marry him?”
“I don’t know. Oh, Madge, I don’t know anything—where I am—what I want
to do—what I ought to do—what’s to become of me. I guess my folks are
bothering most. Dad’s hard-boiled in lots of ways. Yet all the same, I
don’t fear him half so much as I do mother. It’ll scandalize her so
she’s going to make my life a misery. And not half so much because I’ve
done any moral wrong as because what I’ve done isn’t sanctioned by the
Best People. Damn the Best People! Who are they? Where are they? What
are they—that they should injure me so?”
“Calm yourself, child. Then it’s fright of your mother that’s bothering
you most?”
“I guess so. Yes!”
“Then don’t be frightened any more. Because when your mother comes to
Mount Hadley in the morning, I’ll take it upon myself to see her and
explain everything away all right. As for yourself, my foster-mother is
very sensible about such things. Perhaps that’s why I’ve come to look
upon them so impersonally myself. I’ll go up and have a talk with
mother. For a few months you can be our guest. When the crucial time
comes, mother will arrange matters. We are going abroad this summer. In
so far as any one, even your parents, need know, you are accompanying us
as our guest. My mother won’t even ask who you are, if you don’t care
for her to know; any name you wish to go by will be perfectly all
right.”
“And my mother need never learn?”
“That depends upon my talk with her in the morning. Just now, in so far
as Mount Hadley is concerned, you’ve broken down as a result of the
final exams, and the excitement of Commencement.”
“Oh, Madge! Madge!” Bernice went down suddenly on her knees with her
feverish head in Madelaine’s lap. She covered Madelaine’s cool, capable
hands with kisses. Her tears came in such a flood they dripped from her
dimpled chin. “Tell me, Madge—you know everything—tell me what’s ahead
for me. I don’t know, Madge. I never knew. Those things were always
‘shocking! shocking!’”
In the next half-hour Madelaine simplified the great fundamentals of
life into words of one syllable. Bernie clung to her convulsively when
Madelaine came to leave.
“There’s a God,” whispered the tanner’s daughter thickly, reverently,
“because He made you, Madelaine Theddon!”
At ten-thirty that same evening Madelaine was back in Hathaway Hall,
Mount Hadley, perfect in an evening gown of gold satin and cobweb lace,
dancing divinely with a clean-cut young fellow from Boston “Tech” who
was going to Buenos Aires in August as an architect for the Argentine
Government.
The clean-cut young fellow decided Miss Theddon the cleverest girl he
had ever met, as well as the most beautiful. She discussed architecture
with him as though she had already qualified for an architect’s position
herself.
II
The following evening Madelaine sat in her room and from her
ivy-bordered window looked down upon the little town she was leaving on
the morrow. Behind her the lights had been extinguished. Now and then a
trio of white figures moved across the lawn or the Common below, in and
out of the shadows made by the lordly elms. Happy laughter died on the
summer night. Somewhere down the street piano keys were tinkling and the
rich tenor of a man’s voice was softened by the distance.
Madelaine was thinking of Bernie’s problem. Yet not altogether. She was
also thinking of her own. Life was coming to her now as a
responsibility. She owed much to her mother, far more to the world that
had been so good to her, and the poor, perplexed, fog-groping men and
women—especially young men and women—in it. What should be her life
work? How should she try to repay that debt mounting with each passing
month and year to overwhelming proportion?
Marriage did not seem her end and aim. Not then! She had an intuition
that marriage would come afterward, after she had paid the debt, or
tried to pay it. What then?
Always her well-ordered brain came back to Bernie. There must be many
Bernies. Could she find her niche helping them? How?
She tried drastic self-analysis. Then she relaxed and tried yielding
herself unreservedly to instinct.
Finally she thought of Bernie in terms of immediate help—guiding her
through her Gethsemane—concretely. The function of nursing was but a
step to conceiving herself the physician—of body as well as mind.
The aptness of it struck her with peculiar force. A physician! Why not?
Women were assailing all citadels of professions and business. Why not a
physician? A great, warm, poignant self-assurance welled up within her.
Why had she not thought of it before?
In the ensuing ten moments her life course lay clear as an etching
before her. The film between herself and the future had suddenly been
swept aside. She was radiantly, unreasoningly happy. She wanted to sing
with the ecstasy of the revelation.
III
She did sing. Whereupon she was so happy too that she wept—a little bit.
What had taken possession of her? For the first time she felt blindly
content to relax to intuitions and emotions.
It was her last night in the dormitory room, where she had passed four
beautiful years. Her roommate had already departed. Madelaine arose, her
calm face suffused with a quiet glory. She turned on the lights.
On the dressing table the last of her effects lay for final packing in
her bag on the morrow. Among them was a poem framed in a heavy copper
border. It had hung above her study table the two years past. She had
grown very intimate with that little news-print poem on its deep brown
mapping.
Though she could repeat it perfectly, she read it again now, line by
line and word by word:
“Yet some great noon in the sun-glare bright
In some vast open space,
You’ll stand, flesh-clothed, with your arms outstretched,
And triumph on your face.”
She sat for a quarter hour with the framed poem in her shapely fingers.
Her eyes were looking through a million miles. Nathaniel Forge! Who was
he? What had ever caused him to write such a poem?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XIX
TACT AND DISCRETION
I
The box-shop was haunted!
Old Jake Richards made the discovery. He based his contention on
concrete observation and abstract deduction.
Jake was the father of the Richards girl who had remained at work in the
Forge factory during the “strike.” He had three boys and four other
girls. The Richards family lived on the northern edge of the “flats” at
the end of the road on which the box-shop was situated. It was a
hollow-eyed gray house with broken steps, set back in a cluttered yard.
It had a French roof and its blinds were missing and family bedding was
everlastingly hanging from the second-story windows.
Jake was Caleb Gridley’s “all-around man” at the tannery, a sort of
workman-foreman-superintendent. He had held the position for many years.
Socially, from the mere location of his domicile, he did not exist. Then
there was the nature of his trade, the skinning of carcasses. Lastly his
gross prolificality in the matter of children. Openly he bragged of his
wife’s versatility at giving birth to offspring in the morning and
“doin’ a good week’s wash” in the afternoon. This may or may not have
been true. In so far as fastidious Paris was concerned, however, it
established Jake as somewhat beyond the pale.
Jake, old Caleb and a gang of steam fitters had worked until three
o’clock one Sunday morning installing a new boiler in the tannery. Jake
had plodded his weary way homeward just before daylight. Arriving
opposite the box-shop office, he raised his eyes to receive the start of
his life. There were not many starts in old Jake’s life, by the way.
Most of them were stops.
The box-shop was built about fifty feet back from the road. Not back so
far, however, but that Jake had an unobstructed view of the office door.
There were no lights in the gaunt, ark-like structure. The nearest arc
lamp was an eighth of a mile away, across the waving acres of cattails,
and rushes. Also the moon was going down.
Nevertheless, outlined quite clearly in the window of that inky black
office door was a human torso. Also a very white face.
It was absolutely motionless,—that apparition. As Jake chanced to be in
the shadow of the rushes across the road, it appeared to take no note of
him or behave as though he had seen.
Jake could not pass onward. He stood rooted to the spot while icy chills
played up and down his back. Who could be in an unlighted box-shop at
three in the morning, standing grimly behind the door glass, gazing out
into the waning night, “like corpses fresh from the grave?”
Jake was too far away to make out the features or gain any idea of
identity. He simply remained motionless and watched.
Then as picture films dissolve and fade into gray nothingness, so that
apparition dissolved into the blackness behind. The oblong of door
window was empty once more.
Jake finally believed a great physical weariness had been responsible
for an optical illusion. He went home. But he awoke his wife and told
her and Milly and the oldest boy also awoke and heard.
The boy confided to his sister when the house had quieted:
“I seen lots o’ funny lights in the box-shop in the night! This ain’t no
news to me! Huh, I thought dad had more brains!”
“Brains? Whatter you mean?” demanded Milly.
The young worldly wiseman laughed, turned over and went back to sleep.
II
It was Milly who carried the news to Nathan the following morning.
Johnathan never arrived at the office until nine or ten o’clock. But he
never failed to set the alarm for five-thirty. When it banged off, he
called to Nathan and kept calling him until he had the boy awakened and
groggily dressing.
Johnathan believed that a proprietor should always be the first one at a
place of business in the morning. It set the proper example for the rest
of the “help.” So Nathan always reached the place at a quarter to seven.
Milly called Nat over behind the paper-cutter. She whispered what her
father had seen before she shed her big over-sized cloak for work.
Nathan’s face colored queerly.
“Please keep this to yourself, Milly,” he ordered. “If it gets out, and
the other girls believe it, they may quit in fright and refuse to come
back, especially if I should want them to work overtime, nights.”
Milly promised. She would have promised “to go seventy miles up the
Amazon River, turn to the right and stay there the rest of her life” if
Nathan had desired it. So far as her small, commonplace soul was
capable, she worshiped the young foreman as the Greeks once worshiped
Apollo. Her feminine intuition grasped the difficulties Nathan
encountered with his father’s twopenny policies. She sympathized with
him. Because it had been Nathan’s business and Nathan’s father, she had
remained in her place during the “strike.” Once when the boy had been
compelled to work supperless until midnight, installing a new motor, she
had plodded uptown in a storm of sleet and bought him a basket of lunch.
The boy was not insensible to these indications of interest. He felt
rather buoyant about them. He was something in the nature of a
lady-killer. But to “let himself go” down into the slough of such a
liaison, he could not. Milly was “factory help.” Owner’s sons didn’t do
such things. She was preposterously out of caste.
Yet he enjoyed the sensation of being the object of an unrequited
affection. It flattered his vanity. Without appearing to do so, he threw
favors in Milly’s way. Once when she injured her hand on a jagged box
nail, he applied first aid, and second aid and third aid and fourth. He
contended such dressings were merely saving the business from the
expense of doctor’s fees. He was thus forestalling a suit for damages
from Milly. It was a matter of business acumen, pure and simple. Once
when Old Jake had been abusively intoxicated and taken her weekly pay
envelope cruelly in the street, Nat had called her back and presented
her with a second envelope, from his own money. It made him feel rather
heroic to do this.
Further than these small experiments in fire-playing, there was nothing
between them. Of course not. There could never be anything between them.
Yet there were times when the two found themselves alone together in the
printing room, especially in the summer time when Milly’s collar
disclosed a generous V of soft chest as white as milk, that the boy’s
fancies ran riot. They carried him away, back to Foxboro Center days
when he and I had first come in contact with the mystery surrounding
sex, especially The Sex. She was only a factory girl. Of course. And
yet, well, she had shown in a hundred crass ways that she loved him. She
would love him more if he would allow it. All in all, it was not
unpleasant. Yet the situation was not without its pathos. Milly could
not help being one of Old Jake’s offspring.
Meanwhile, of course, he was in love with Carol, very much in love with
Carol.
III
How much he was in love with Carol only the heart of a nineteen-year-old
could attest.
Having discovered how easy and simple it was to keep nocturnal trysts,
Nathan began to show a sudden filial docility which pleased and puzzled
Johnathan. The father soon realized that an entire fortnight had passed
during which he had accounted for every moment of his son’s time—perfect
alibis in every instance—and not once had Nathan seen or spoken to the
girl. If Nathan had gone two weeks without her, of course he had taken
his father’s counsel and given up the Sybarite forever. That was only
logic. If the boy showed a strange and unaccountable drowsiness around
three o’clock each afternoon, or if it became increasingly difficult to
awaken him each morning at five-thirty, it was—according to his
mother—because he was “working too hard to the shop.” To which Nathan
amusedly subscribed. Because he had given heed to his father and yielded
obedience without that threatened murder being necessary, Johnathan
conceived the idea of letting the boy have a week’s vacation and take a
little trip somewhere, say down to Nantasket. Nathan, however, failed to
enthuse. With visible relief on Johnathan’s part, the vacation idea was
swiftly dropped. The father did not cease from reminding the son of the
former’s magnanimity, however, when later differences arose upon other
matters.
The thing which troubled Nathan in those hectic days was Edith’s
propensity to be allowed the same nocturnal privilege. It was quite all
right for Nathan to spend his nights in the company of a reasonably
pretty girl who was treated “cruelly” by her relatives. He was a man.
But MacHenry shot too good a game of Kelly pool to make Nathan feel that
a duplication of the stunt by his sister was advisable. His anxiety was
ended one morning, however, when Edith fell over a chair in the outer
hallway on her return, before her brother knew she had been out. The
parents did not awaken but Nathan did. He leaped out to find Edith’s
hair down and her clothing torn. One sleeve of her shirt waist was slit
to ribbons and she was limping painfully.
“What’s happened, Edie; where you been?” the brother cried frightenedly.
“Oh, he tried to get too fresh!” was the sister’s rejoinder. She went to
her room, destroyed the torn waist and slipped into bed. The MacHenry
fellow disappeared from town next day. While Nat had never given his
consent to Edith’s nocturnal absences nor abetted them, he was thankful
his sister’s interest had waned.
For Nathan, however, no summer was ever quite like that summer. For
spring passed and June came, and at least three times a week he left his
room as soon as he heard his father’s heavy snoring to return in the
moist, mystic hush of dawn—dawn broken only by the energetic chirping of
countless song birds and the dull knocking rattle of distant milk
wagons.
The news which Milly Richards had brought advised him that he was
growing overbold, however. For two weeks thereafter, he and Carol took
the Gilberts Mills road instead of going down to the box-shop, where the
girl spent the night nestled in her lover’s arms.
So it was not this illicit tryst-keeping, finally wrecked by its own
success, that caused Johnathan’s complacency to explode in his face. It
was a letter that inadvertently fell from Nathan’s hip pocket one day in
the mill and which Joe Partridge brought with a grin to Johnathan.
“Picked up some private correspondence,” he observed. “Guess it belongs
to Nathan.”
Private correspondence? Nathan?
Johnathan took the bulky envelope addressed in a woman’s round hand to
his son at the local postoffice,—General Delivery. He pulled out the
sheets and the opening salutation struck him between the eyes like a
brick.
Johnathan was limp all over when he had finished that effusive epistle.
The father scarcely had the strength to rise from his chair. He found
his hat and coat and went out into the August sunshine. He must think,
think.
So they were keeping the asinine courtship alive by correspondence? Fool
that he was, he might have suspected.
Yet John had read between the lines of the girl’s letter what was no
thumb-nail sentiment between lovesick adolescents. The two addressed
each other now as grown man and woman. Fortunately, no references had
been made by Carol to their nocturnal rendezvous. Johnathan never
knew—and does not appreciate to this day—toward the brink of what
precipice he did all in his power to drive his boy. But he knew that
Nathan had asked the girl to be his wife. She had accepted him. They
were only waiting the saving of enough money on Nathan’s part and the
making of enough “clothes” on Carol’s to perfect an elopement.
The father’s imagination and self-pity started on a rampage again. His
temper began to growl. By six o’clock he was a roaring small-town lion,
seeking whom he might devour,—principally something in the boy line
under twenty-one.
Tact and discretion! Tact and discretion!
Johnathan knew he should employ them, that he _must_ control his temper
or another time he might break worse than his knuckles. Yet how could he
save his son from this horribly yawning pit of premature matrimony? At
last he had it! Archibald Cuttner!
It was true that Johnathan did not know Archibald Cuttner only as he
sometimes thrust the collection plate in front of him on Sunday
mornings, or had brought his Congress shoes to the Main Street shop for
resoling—“in the old days”, as Johnathan already phrased it. But that
did not deter him from going at once and laying his case before the
girl’s grandparent in a great tumult of hysterical fatherhood.
The Cuttners were finishing the evening meal as Johnathan rang the bell.
Old Archibald, a thin little man with queer, humped shoulders, came out
with his napkin still tucked in his turkey neck.
They sat down in the porch chairs for a time and Johnathan handed the
girl’s letter across and Archibald read it.
“God!” was Cuttner’s comment as he finished page after page of the
“mush.” It disgusted him as much as it had angered Johnathan. It had
been fifty years since Archibald had been nineteen and in love.
“S’pose we walk a pace,” he suggested. “I’d like to smoke. And we’ll
talk.”
The two men left the house and while Cuttner puffed at a long black
cheroot, Johnathan narrated his parental “troubles” from the first.
“Yer right, Forge,” the old man agreed. “Getting a boy past the ‘girl
age’ is the hardest job a man can have shoved on to him—and the most
thankless. Give ’em a free rein and the young asses go stick their heads
in the trap o’ married care. Tighten the rein and it only makes ’em
crazier to get at it. So what’s a man to do, anyhow? I’m beginning to
think we don’t lay on the harness tug these days strong enough—to begin
with—girls as well as boys.”
“That doesn’t save Nathaniel from this misalliance with your
granddaughter now. What can we do?”
“What do you want I should do—at the girl end of it?”
“Couldn’t you send her back where she came from?”
“Back to A-higher? Yeah, I can send her back to A-higher? But what
assurance you got this balky young colt won’t kick over the traces the
minute she’s gone and start after her, dragging the whiffletree?”
“I’ll attend to that. You get the girl out of town. I’ll keep with him
and watch him if I have to eat and sleep with him every night from now
till the time he’s twenty-one.”
“Won’t be able to help yerself then, will yer?”
“But he’ll be a man grown, then, in the eyes of the law. He’ll know his
own mind.”
“Ain’t far from it now, Forge. Nineteen, ain’t he?”
“But two years at this period makes all the difference in the world.
Anyhow, if he deliberately goes wrong the moment he’s of age, my hands
are clean. I’ll have done my duty in the eyes of the law and of God.
After that, he’s got only himself to thank if he makes a foul bed and
has to lie in it.”
So Johnathan found an unexpected ally in Archibald Cuttner. And the
latter returned home to order Carol to “pack her traps and go back to
her folks.”
IV
Johnathan was especially jovial and agreeable about the house that
night. He came in whistling. He cracked a couple of ancient jokes and
talked about “sparing the money” to get the hall papered. His family
looked at one another in puzzled astonishment. Mrs. Forge asked for ten
dollars to spend on clothes and got five, three of which were promptly
appropriated by Edith for a waist to wear to a dance that she was going
to attend unbeknown to her parents. All of them felt electrically that
some extraordinary business was afoot.
The family retired about ten o’clock. The lights went out. Johnathan
fell asleep almost at once. He said it was easy for him to fall asleep
because he always had a clear conscience.
But Nathan, sitting in his room, heard a sudden familiar whistle on the
walk outside, about midnight. He escaped by the usual method to find his
sweetheart in tears. They had walked a considerable distance before
Nathan learned the cause. Now her grandfather was “cruel” to her.
“Oh, Nathan! I’ve got to go back to A-higher. He—he—doesn’t want me
around here any more.”
Nathan heard this with a clammy throttling of his heart. Then his mind
leaped intuitively to his father’s unusual affability that night.
“Carrie—I’ll bet five dollars my father’s seen your gramp and they’ve
clubbed together to bust us up!”
“I’m sick and disgusted with being treated like children by two old
bigots!” the girl cried vehemently. “I’m almost ready to quit!”
“Quit?” cried Nathan in alarm.
“Yes—quit! We’re grown up, now! What difference does a couple of years
make, anyhow?”
“Let’s risk the box-shop once more, Carrie. Let’s go down and talk it
over and—I’ll hold you.”
“Holding her” was eminently to be desired by all witnesses to these
presents. So toward the box-shop they headed.
It was a close, muggy night with the heat lightning playing off in the
low northwest. Clouds hid the moon and stars. The dusty earth was
thirsty for rain. Most of the lamps were already extinguished in the
houses en route as boy and girl made their way down toward the “flats.”
They stole into the shadowed factory yard, keeping well out of sight
close to the rushes. Nathan unlocked the door softly. On tiptoe they
entered. The door was locked behind them. The office was very stuffy. It
smelled of musty ledgers and wintergreen library paste. High on the wall
a philosophical old clock ticked on through the night.
The boy removed hat and coat. He pulled out one of the cane-seated
swivel chairs. Almost before he had seated himself the girl was in his
arms and sobbing convulsively on his shoulder.
Nathan pulled out a low desk-drawer for his feet. He leaned back and
smoothed the girl’s soft chestnut hair. The lone arc lamp far across the
rushes shone weirdly into the room, making a rectangular splotch of
light upon the western wall.
“Oh, Natie,” the girl sobbed softly, “I love you so! I don’t want to go
back to A-higher! And they treat me so cruel—so cruel! My stepmother
doesn’t like me and my gramp doesn’t want me. I wish I was dead!”
“You’ve got me, dear,” the boy reminded her. A thousand love-struck
swains would have said the same.
“But I won’t have, Natie, if I go back to A-higher!”
“Oh, Carrie, I wish I was sure dad wouldn’t have our marriage annulled.
I’d say let’s get married right off now and spite him. But I’m afraid he
would. He’s just that crazy against me having a girl of any sort, you or
anybody. Then again, here’s the shop. This’ll be mine some day, if I
don’t run off. I’m making it into a whale of a business. Oh, Carrie, if
dad would only be sensible like other boys’ fathers! If he only would!”
“Natie, tell me something.” The girl’s voice was soft. Her face was
averted. She picked aimlessly at one of his shirt buttons. “Is that why
you’ve dodged running away and getting married up to now? Because you’ve
been afraid your dad would have our marriage annulled? Because you
weren’t of age, maybe?”
“Yes, Carrie. That’s—the—reason.”
A long silence ensued. The girl’s weeping had ceased. The night and the
world were very quiet, excepting for a light hot wind which was blowing
over the rushes in the vanguard of a shower. Some of the rushes brushed
eerily against the box-shop walls. The old building gave off queer
creakings and night noises upstairs. A mouse nibbled at something which
rattled in a far corner.
“Oh, Carrie!”
The boy drew a thick poignant sigh. The girl turned her pale face up to
his for a kiss. She got it. Both sighed. She nestled close. The clock
ticked—ticked—ticked——
Suddenly the boy sensed that the girl was trembling. She raised her free
hand and smoothed his hair for a moment. Then gradually she dropped
it—dropped it down to her own face—held it across her eyes.
“Nathan,” she whispered softly.
“Yes, Carrie!”
The girl drew a quick breath—with an effort. She placed her lips close
to her lover’s ear and whispered.
Young Nat Forge, “incorrigible son,” sat with the girl he loved at
nineteen,—sat and held her close. And his throbbing eyes stared across
fields of romance, down into valleys of _verboten_ Avalon where acacia
trees grew too thickly at a moment for passage through.
It was a woman who came to the first man in the Garden. She carried
fruit of the knowledge-tree of good and evil and bade him eat. Yet
perchance she loved him no less on that account.
V
It was a quarter to three. The storm had rolled and clacked above the
sleeping town and countryside. The office had been lighted by swift and
vivid whips of electric violence. The deluge of nocturnal rain had
washed the earth cool and pure again. Steadily in a corner trough
outside, an eaves spout emptied with a singing sound,—even as the
deserted streets ran mud and rivulets.
The girl still lay in Nathan’s arms. She had not moved. Neither had
moved. The boy’s muscles ached. The air was horribly stuffy, almost
sickish. Morning would come now—was coming—swiftly.
“Carrie,” said the boy huskily, “there’s a lot we owe to ourselves—to
our own—happiness! In fourteen months I’ll be of age. Fourteen months
can be a long, long time—or awful, awful short. Suppose, dear, you do as
your grandfather wishes—go back to Ohio. Stay there—as best you can.
Live as I’ll be living—for the day I’m twenty-one. On that day you and
I’ll be married. _That’s_ how much I love you, dear!”
The girl sensed rebuke in his pronouncement. Her face burned.
Unconsciously she shrank away. She wholly lacked the capacity to
appreciate the depth of the lad’s great affection or the worth of his
soul thereby disclosed. The lad went on quickly:
“Go away as if we didn’t mind—as if we agreed to the separation. But
I’ll find some one in town to whom you can mail your letters—who’ll slip
them safely to me without dad knowing. We can write——”
“Nathan, are you so weak, so under your father’s thumb, that you’re
afraid to outwit him?”
“No,” the other whispered. “I’m not.” And he spoke the truth. “I love
you, dear. I told you that before.”
“Do you think it’s easy for me to go?” The girl’s voice was tight with
pain. What was it she feared? What had happened that night, affecting
them both so vitally?
“No easier than it is for me to stay. It’s always hardest for the one
who stays, Carrie!”
“You’re a man! Such things mean more to a woman than a man.” They had
both traveled far from the night they had talked drivel in the Cuttner
sitting room.
“It seems to me the right thing to do, Carrie. There’s really nothing
else!”
The girl left his arms. She went to the door. With hands on hips, she
stood looking out.
“I see—you don’t love me—as much as I thought you did!” she said
bitterly.
“Carrie!” The boy’s cry rang sharp. “Don’t say that! Don’t!”
“What else can I say?”
“Carrie! I——”
“Let’s go home, Nathan. It must be almost morning!”
He came around in front of her. He laid tender hands upon her shoulders.
He forced her to look up into his drawn young face.
She suffered it, yet brokenly. She had lifted back a veil from the
vestal treasures of her Inner Shrine and he had mocked those treasures
somehow. So she believed.
“Carrie,” he promised, “I’ll wait for you, I’ll work for you, I’ll plan
for you, I’ll bend all my effort and all my life to make you happy. And
it will be very sweet when it comes, dear,—very sweet.”
Her eyes blinked at him several times in the dusk. She turned her face
away without answering, off toward that distant arc lamp across the
acres of rain-washed rushes.
“I’ll go!” she said in a strained voice. Then she hung her head
suddenly.
Nathan raised her face again and drew her to him. Their lips met. But
the perturbed boy suddenly shuddered. Carol’s lips were cold,
unresponsive.
The boy’s joints were stiff. There was a bitter, brackish taste in his
mouth. His head throbbed from lack of sleep. But from his finger he
slipped a small bloodstone ring he had purchased the week following the
“strike” with the first big money he had ever owned. He found the girl’s
left hand. It was cold, lifeless. But the ring fitted her finger. He
kissed it.
“Let it stay there dear—until—until——”
The girl turned away. At the door again she stood looking out. Around
and around on her finger she turned the ring.
VI
They stole forth from the building and yard. And vivid to Nathan came
memory of another day back in younger boyhood when he had stolen forth
so from a wood,—back to a picnic ground, wondering why he was not
entirely happy, why the kisses of a girl had become cloying and
tasteless. Only with this difference: there was no father now to meet
and flog him.
Carol went ahead. They had to pick their way carefully or sink
ankle-deep in mire. The town still slept but it had changed somehow. It
had changed.
No further word was spoken until the Cuttner gate.
The girl shuddered when with a proprietary right the boy took her in his
arms for the final embrace.
“Oh, Natie!” she cried huskily, “you’ll never, never know!”
“Know what, dear?”
“I can’t tell you! You wouldn’t understand. Good-by, dear! It’s—it’s
getting light and some of the neighbors might see us.”
She had never remarked upon this before.
“When will you be leaving, dear?” he asked when he could trust himself
to speak.
“On the eleven o’clock, probably.” It was a spiritless answer. “There’s
no use for me waiting around—if I’m really going.”
“But, Carrie! Don’t take it that way! Don’t act as if I were sending you
off.”
“What else are you doing, Nathan? Good night, dear. I’ve got to go in!
It’s getting lighter and lighter.”
“I’ll be at the station to see you off if I have to lock dad in a closet
to do it!”
“Your dad! I hope he’ll feel satisfied with what he’s done! He’s made a
good job of it—and you!”
Up the steps she crept stealthily and into the house. Though she waved
him good-by at the door, the boy was miserable. But she was gone and
nothing remained but for him to go also.
The Forge box-shop was never notable thereafter for any untoward
spiritualistic phenomena.
VII
It rained that morning. A steady drizzle continued to fall in the
aftermath of the thunderstorm. At the breakfast table Nathan had looked
his father straight in the eye and announced:
“Dad, Carol Gardner’s leaving town for Ohio this morning. I’m going down
to see her off!”
Johnathan was angered by the way his son spoke. But he decided, after
all, he could afford to be magnanimous. A boy Nat’s age ought to begin
to have a few privileges.
“I understand,” the father answered. And he prepared to leave for the
shop as though it was quite the usual thing.
So Nathan went to the depot to spend a last few minutes—wildly sweet,
bitterly poignant—with the first girl he had loved with the maturing
affection of a man.
The clouds never dripped a more depressing, groggy rain. The station
platform was a long, greasy puddle. Bobbing umbrellas were everywhere as
the down train to the junction pulled in.
“Well Carrie—good-by,” he said at last.
“Good-by, Nathan,” she answered.
“Till we meet again.”
“Yes! Till we meet again!”
That was all either had the chance to say. A crowd of rain-soaked
travelers bore the girl away from him, into a small umbrella-closing mob
around the car steps. Carol managed a last wave from the platform of the
coach. Then she had to attend to the business of finding a seat. The
train pulled out.
“My God! Have I done the right thing—letting her go?” the heartbroken
boy cried hoarsely, as the train drew slowly from the platform,
gathering speed as it clicked on shining rails down the yards. But there
was no one to answer his heart-cry.
The train had gone. Carol had gone. The town remained—the
factory—work—memories!
It rained that morning!
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XX
SIDETRACKED
I
The train had gone. Carol had gone. The town remained—the
factory—work—memories.
Coat collar upturned, hands deep-thrust in trousers pockets, Nathan
slopped through the puddles along down to the shop.
The office chanced to be empty as he entered. He looked around. It was
difficult to believe that this was the same room in which just a few
hours before he had held the girl he loved in his arms. It was difficult
to credit that at this moment a train was bearing her away, farther and
farther away; that there would be no more talks and walks and trysts;
that she was gone, gone!
Then the reaction came. He passed a hideous day.
The rain stopped around five o’clock, though the trees dripped
throughout the evening and pedestrians were grotesque through mist in
which the arc lamps were nebulous.
His father was still more affable during supper, even boresomely
jocular. He had turned a neat piece of business. Some day on bended
knee—Johnathan was strong on the “bended knee” and “kissed hand”
metaphor—his boy would thank him gratefully and humbly. It was with a
vast relief that the man was able to wave his hand in generous
permission when Nathan announced he was going for a walk. Why should not
Nathan go for a walk? He, Johnathan, had walked much when a young man.
And, thank God, there was no longer any need for nerve-racking
surveillance to see that the son kept away from The Sex. Had not he,
Johnathan, made certain the girl had left town by watching that
departure from the interior of a fruit-store opposite the depot, that
morning?
Nathan went out and roamed the streets of Paris. It was inevitable that
after ten o’clock he should draw near the Cuttner premises.
In the shadow of the big tree at the gate he gazed at the darkened
house. The lonely boy tried to imagine Carol still in the place,
awaiting his whistle. Once he did whistle, for at heart he was much of a
child. But he was whistling at the husk of a memory. The soul of the
Cuttner homestead had departed.
In his loneliness that night, locked finally in his room, the boy’s
emotions overpowered him and he sobbed. Johnathan, listening at the
door, finally tiptoed back to his own room.
“He’s crying,” the man told his wife. “He’s sorry! But he’ll come to see
that his father knew best after all!”
“Poor Nat!” sighed the mother. “He does go into things head-over-heels
so—even a little passing acquaintance with a strange girl.”
“Those tears will bring him back to God,” opined Johnathan.
“Oh, bosh!” snapped Anna Forge. She rolled angrily as far from Johnathan
as she could get and in this contorted position sighed at her own hard
lot and fell asleep.
II
The remainder of that summer and autumn and the ensuing winter, when Nat
turned twenty, was a time of comment-causing expansion for the box-shop.
The town had been left for Nathan—though a town with its soul gone out,
like Archibald Cuttner’s house—and the factory had been left—and
work—and memories. But the greatest of these was work. The boy threw
himself into business with a febrile intensity which alarmed his father
almost as much as it pleased him. Alarmed him because he could not
exactly account for it. Also he had difficulty keeping up with his son
in the matter of handling the business. This aroused his ire.
Nathan, as has been emphasized, had received an invaluable training
under old Caleb Gridley. Moreover, after Carol left, in order to
anesthetize his loneliness, the boy spent evening after evening with old
Caleb. Sometimes this queer pair indulged their esthetic souls in
poetry,—Cowper, Wordsworth, Keats, Pope, Browning; Old Caleb would sit
in his big chair before the fire, slipper swinging, vest unbuttoned,
iron-gray head nodding in approval, as the lad’s musical voice rose and
fell in cadence of the finer selections.
More often they discussed the box-shop and its affairs. To old Caleb the
boy brought his problems, his newly discovered short cuts, his dilemmas
encountered with the idiosyncrasies of employees, his tangles of
finance. And old Caleb, from a wealth of Yankee experience and common
sense, encouraged the boy in the right places and delicately discouraged
him when he might otherwise have “flown off at a tangent” and allowed
his enthusiasms to go galloping.
Johnathan never knew of these consultations. He never dreamed that Caleb
was really running his shop through his son; that Caleb subsequently
knew more about the folding-box business than Johnathan himself. The
latter only knew that Nathan “did things” and then “consulted him”
afterward. That the “things” which Nathan did reduced expenses,
increased production, sold goods, brought money from delinquent
creditors, cut small figure with the father. Somehow his boy had no
patience when time after time the father expressed a wish to “go into
conference.” There were two great joys in being a business man, for
Johnathan. One was opening the morning mail. The other was “going into
conference.”
The fact of the matter was that Nathan had deftly taken the management
of the business out of his father’s hands. There was nothing left for
Johnathan to do. There was no one to “boss.” He worried a lot about it.
This worry often broke out in open rebellion. At such times, father and
son quarreled. These quarrels had chiefly to do with supplies. One day
Nathan ordered a new cutter-knife. It cost twenty-eight dollars. The
father’s contention was that while Nathan might have had to get the
knife quickly to maintain production, they had not “gone into
conference” about it first.
“But you were in Baldwinsville that day—all day!” snapped Nathan. “How
could I consult you when you weren’t here to consult?”
“You could have awaited my return!”
“And shut down the cutter to do it—send Partridge home—make him lose a
day’s wages and the business a matter of a hundred and seventy-five
dollars—just to ask you if I could buy a new knife which you would have
had to consent to, anyway? Where’s the sense in that?”
The economics of the thing were swept aside by Johnathan. He clung
doggedly to the contention that they had not “gone into conference”
about it first. Thereupon he passed the rest of that day evolving a very
elaborate order system. With a needle-pointed pencil and a ruler he laid
out an order form. He took it up to the local print shop and ordered
twenty thousand blanks printed and finished off in pads. Prominently
upon the face of each was the line in big type: “No orders valid without
the signature of J. H. Forge, Pres.” The bill for the printing was
seventy-eight dollars. The fallacy of the system was that Johnathan had
to be on hand to sign a blank every time the business required anything
from a bottle of paste to the use of a storehouse for goods waiting
shipment. This grew to be a nuisance. Nathan began to “countersign” the
orders, as he was “on the job” twelve hours a day. The fourth week the
blanks were discarded,—as order forms. The second month the office girls
were using them for scratch paper. But they cost seventy-eight dollars.
It was Nathan who made a hurried trip to Burlington one Saturday
afternoon and landed the Cudworth and Halstead business for candy
cartons. It was Nathan who cleverly “tied up” the output of the Cobb
City Pressed Board Mills and diverted it to the Forge plant when prices
shot up after the depression of 1907. It was Nathan who suggested
scrapping all their old presses and putting in the latest type of power
machines then being evolved by a Philadelphia firm. To finance this
radical move, it was Nathan who suggested that they incorporate the
box-shop and put out fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of its preferred
stock. And it was Nathan who, under the clandestine tutelage of old
Caleb, engineered that organization and got the money.
Against all these departures Johnathan fought tooth and claw,—all but
the procuring of new money. The size to which his thumb-nail business
had grown began to frighten him. More and more he wanted to “go into
conference.” But Nathan, the load of the organization on his
enthusiastic young shoulders, formed the habit of humorously responding,
“I’m too busy doing things to talk about them!” That angered Johnathan.
It pushed him back into a slough of self-pity, outraged dignity and
mocked parental authority. All but the procuring of new capital, I say.
It was a vast responsibility, being accountable for new capital. It also
worried Johnathan mightily. But it was nevertheless a pleasant sort of
worry. He inflated in his own esteem. He walked about Paris as a
Somebody. He gave less and less time to the “practical” affairs of the
company. He no longer “paid off personally” on Saturday afternoons.
Instead, he appeared for the first time in tailored clothes, kept
banker’s hours and saw himself as a Capitalist.
A stenographer had long ago been hired to ameliorate the time-consuming
process of punching out correspondence with one finger on the old blind
calligraph. Johnathan had a bell installed in a “private” office to push
when he wanted this girl. He pushed it on an average of twice an hour.
He wrote letters soliciting business from firms too far away to permit
of freight rates leaving any profit. He answered advertisements for
catalogs in the back of _System Magazine_ and _The Modern Factory_. Of
course important letters about supplies and shipments which Nathan had
dictated hurriedly during noon hour, were sidetracked for these
dictations by Johnathan. Wasn’t he president and treasurer?
Frequently, he made a “tour of inspection” through his factory,
especially after the addition was built, the principal feature of these
trips being to criticize methods which Nathan had instigated, pick up
bits of cardboard and string from the floor on the contention that the
only way to get rich is to watch the waste boxes, and left a long list
of orders behind which were never executed, which the employees laughed
at, and which Johnathan himself forgot within five minutes after
returning to his swivel chair.
III
Of course, all this expansion and feverish industrial activity on
Nathan’s part had but one basis: The day he was twenty-one he was going
to marry Carol and he proposed to have a business sizable enough and
profitable enough to clothe her in purple and fine linen and make her a
Somebody because she was the wife of Nathan Forge.
The first month after Carol’s departure, and well along into the autumn,
bulky epistles arrived for Nathan on an average of twice a week. Nathan
had at once appealed to me to act as clearing house for this
correspondence, and I therefore unwittingly kept a finger on the pulse
of the courtship.
Johnathan, with small-bored shrewdness, had given orders at the local
postoffice that all Nathan’s mail was to be saved and delivered to
himself. And as no letters with Ohio postmarkings or addressed in
feminine penmanship ever arrived in those following months, Jonathan
knew the “affair” was over, and, praise the Almighty, “over”
successfully. Carol’s letters came to me in a double envelope, with
Nat’s name inside. When he wasn’t at Caleb Gridley’s in the evening, he
was at my house using my desk and typewriter answering them.
Something of the old intimacy between Nat and myself was restored after
Carol’s departure. I had meanwhile finished high school but been obliged
to take a job in the local newspaper office. After work, or on Sundays,
we fell into the habit of taking long walks about the town and
countryside, while the boy raved to me of the undying affection in
Carol’s letters or his increasing successes at the factory.
Carol, it appeared, had recovered her aplomb upon her return to
A-higher. Her letters were full of minute accountings of her time and
activities and how she was “getting her clothes ready” and what house in
town Nathan should try to procure for their habitation, and what a boor
and a bear Johnathan was, and what a trial and a nuisance he must be to
the son generally.
And yet, through all of that twentieth year, and especially throughout
the summer, there were days and nights when the boy’s loneliness almost
crazed him.
Through the town he wandered, bareheaded beneath the stars. There was
one ballad he and Carol had sung over and over until the lad knew the
words from memory. Nat hummed the tune to himself on many starlit nights
when he walked out toward the old lumber pile on the Gilberts Mills
road:
“I am writing to you, Molly, while the fair moon softly shines,
As it did the night before you went away;
When it shone in all its glory
And I told Love’s old, old story
And you promised you’d return and wed some day.”
It was a sickly, sentimental thing, being sung in all the picture shows
and Wednesday-evening courting hours. But it was the second verse which
probed the boy’s heart and always brought tears to his eyes:
“All alone I’m roaming, Molly,
Down the dear old village lane,
To the wildwood where we strolled with hearts so light;
In the old church they are singing,
Fondest memories it’s bringing
Of the girl I love, so far away, to-night.
Some folks laugh and call it folly
When I tell them you’re still true,
But you love me, don’t you, Molly?
Say you’re coming back, please do!”
The boy forgot all about his poetry, unless it was to try putting his
loneliness and heart-hunger in words. Yet somehow he could not publish
these. He filed them away with Carol’s letters. He lived, moved, had his
being, in the box-shop.
Johnathan had been elected president and treasurer, Charley Newton who
had left an office job at the process works to become the Forge
bookkeeper (and learn how to thwart Johnathan making entries in his
books and getting them awry), had been elected vice-president. Joe
Partridge, who had arisen to the prominence of foreman, was clerk of the
corporation, though Lawyer Bob Hentley did the secretarial work and all
Joel had to do was sign on the dotted line. Nathan, not being of age,
could not be an officer. His large capacity was “General
Superintendent.”
As money flowed into the firm’s coffers, the prospects of the Forge
family started looking up.
Johnathan began buying suits of clothes, evolved a propensity for bat
neckties and learned to smoke cigars. He was less conscientious about
his attendance at church and took long trips off “to keep the trade in
line.” Invariably he found, however, that his son had contrived to do
this by letter. When his “trade” began discussing deals and discounts of
which Johnathan had never heard, it made him feel rather foolish and
always angry. He returned grimly determined that he was going to run his
own business or know the reason why. But before the first day was ended,
he had become so engrossed in some new office contrivance or new set of
forms, that he forgot larger problems,—or some quarrel with his boy sent
him off to walk the streets for hours and pity himself. The matter of
running his own business sagged until it was time for another venture at
“keeping the trade in line.”
The Forges left the Spring Street house and bought the old Longstreet
residence on Vermont Avenue. Whereupon Mrs. Forge and Edith began to
“put on style” and rise to the occasion generally. The womenfolk of a
prominent manufacturer had to keep up appearances. Charge accounts were
opened at the leading stores and for the first time in her mortal
existence Mrs. Forge’s appetite for chocolate caramels was satiated,—the
kind with nuts in them.
IV
Nathan was to become twenty-one on the second day of December. I knew,
as his confidant, that the original plan was a wedding between Carol and
himself on the ensuing Christmas. But as that late summer and autumn
dragged along toward the first frosts, I grew increasingly worried. The
cause of my perturbation was Carol’s correspondence.
The first letters, written in the initial pangs of separation, had come
to hand twice a week,—or as often as Nat’s reply allowed. From September
to the first week in November, no letter whatever came for Nat. Then an
epistle arrived which the boy tore open and read with an avidity that
was piteous. She had been ill. She would write at greater length when
she felt better.
“I’d find an excuse to make a road trip, Bill, and go out and see her,”
he told me. “But, hang it all, I can’t leave the factory. Dad would have
things so snarled up when I got back I’d be six months getting the
débris cleared away and things going smoothly again.”
Worry weighed the boy down. He grew increasingly irritable and somewhat
surly. For hours at a time Johnathan would sit and figure. He would
prove to Nathan that on some order made and shipped six months before
they had lost two mills of a cent on every carton. Thereupon he declared
that Nat’s obstreperousness was heading his father into bankruptcy.
(Johnathan never spent hours figuring orders where the firm had cleaned
up handsomely and absorbed the losses on lesser ventures.) He would
arise in the middle of the night and go down to the shop—after the fires
had been lighted in late October—to see if old Mike Hennessy, the
watchman, was sleeping on the job. He caught him one night fortifying
his courage with a short flat bottle and discharged him on the spot. The
help came down next morning to find the fires out. It was noon before
the plant was again up to standard. Father and son fought out the
question of “hiring and firing” in front of the help—which is an
extremely effective method for maintaining respect among employees for
the principals in any business—and all this sapped Nat’s vitality.
“Thank God you’re twenty-one in a few weeks and my responsibility is
ended!” the father swore as he paced the expansive dining room of the
sepulchral Longstreet residence. His eyes were wild and his hair was
rumpled. He walked with his hands in his pockets and occasionally
grabbed up a book or magazine to hurl at his son whose retorts were
always so apt, effective and unanswerable that Johnathan had to vent his
feelings in action somehow.
Then the night when Nathan was twenty-one came,—the epochal date when he
was free at last.
It was marked by two episodes. The quarrel over Edith and the newspaper
clipping I was called upon to give my friend.
It was a Saturday night and Edith was taking part in a church concert on
the morrow. She had left the house ostensibly to “practice her part” at
the home of a friend. Instead of which she had met the Nelson boy and
inquiry developed, quite accidentally, that she had “skipped off” to a
dance in Wickford.
Nathan had taken his sister’s part. The boy, in the exaltation of his
majority, had dropped an unfortunate remark:
“You’ll be just about as successful in thwarting Edie as you’ve been
successful in thwarting me. You think you busted up my engagement to
Carol, dad. But you didn’t. Carol went away simply to get her clothes
ready. And you might as well know now as any time that I’m marrying her
on Christmas day—in exactly three weeks!”
Johnathan had remained rather wild-eyed for a moment. Then he found his
voice and started cursing. Not content with cursing, he waited until his
son’s back was turned and then dealt him a blow in the shoulder which
sent Nathan smashing against the table. He knocked off crockery with a
crash and sent a coffee pot into the front of a near-by china closet.
Mrs. Forge came running, and as usual, joined in the altercation.
Johnathan’s cursing included his wife. His wife turned livid at a
particularly vile epithet and hurled a plate. Johnathan dodged the plate
and it went neatly through a pane of heavy glass. Then Johnathan picked
up a chair and threw it. It hit the dome above the dining table and
dropped its glass in a shower, leaving the brass shell swaying
ludicrously. Mrs. Forge shrieked and Johnathan bellowed.
On the night of the son’s majority a pleasant time was had by all!
Nathan was unhurt. He walked from the room, got his hat and coat. He
passed out the front door and left his father and mother having their
last quarrel,—while he was an occupant of their house. He came to me.
“Any mail, Bill?” he asked anxiously.
I was punching away at my typewriter in the sitting room. I recollect
that I took a long moment to fill my pipe and relight it before I
answered. But there was no way out—for me. I had been working, trying
subconsciously to evolve a way to break the news to my friend gently.
“No, Nat,” I said at length. “There’s no mail come for you—directly. But
mother gave me a newspaper when I came home—an Ohio paper, addressed to
me.”
“A paper!” cried the boy. “What’s the big idea?”
There was no way out, indeed. The paper was lying on my desk. An item in
the “Social and Personal” column was marked in red ink. I handed it
across.
COLE-GARDNER
A pretty home wedding was solemnized at the residence of Mr. and
Mrs. P. H. Gardner on Temple Street last evening, when Mr.
Gardner’s daughter Carol was joined in matrimony to Mr. Blodgett
Cole, son of Mr. and Mrs. Roger Cole of Union Place. The
marriage was the outcome of a boy-and-girl romance begun in the
graded schools of East Gilead, when ...
I don’t think my friend ever quite finished reading that item. The paper
dropped through his fingers, through his knees, down with a sharp plop!
to the carpet.
“Bill!” cried my friend hoarsely, “Bill!”
“Hard luck, Nat!” was all I could say. “But don’t you let it upset you.
If she’s that kind of girl, she wasn’t worth waiting for in the first
place.”
V
The boy stumbled down our front steps. By the time I had spoken to my
mother and secured hat and coat, he had disappeared.
Where he went no one knows. Anyhow, it doesn’t matter. Around eight
o’clock he appeared at the box-shop. He unlocked the office door and
groped his way inside.
The office had expanded in keeping with the rest of the plant. It now
bore little resemblance to the room in which Nat had kept bitter-sweet
rendezvous with Carol in those Memory Nights. A private office—two of
them, because Johnathan had insisted upon one—had been constructed off
on the right. And Nathan stumbled into his own, leaving all doors open
and lamps burning. He sank in his swivel chair and his forehead went
down in his arms.
* * * * *
“Hello!” called a cheery voice.
Nathan raised his head. His face was the countenance of a middle-aged
man.
A girl was standing in the doorway. She was hatless, despite the winter
chill. She wore an oversized cloak of heavy green plaid. The sleeves
were too long and had been folded back. The cloak was unbuttoned; two of
the buttons, in fact, were missing, and a third was due to fall off
momentarily. Underneath the cloak was a plain white shirtwaist with an
inappropriate low neck. But her hair was done very prettily and her face
was flushed with health and the nip of the night wind. It was Milly
Richards.
“Hello!” returned Nat lifelessly.
“Why! What’s the matter, Nathan? You’re sick!”
The boy’s hollow eyes fastened upon the girl. Deliberately he looked
down her figure as she stood in the doorway, from the pile of brown hair
with its marcelled wave to the curve of her neck, the slightly heaving
bosom, the ample torso and hips, the stolid ankles.
“Shut the door!” said Nathan.
Milly was puzzled, not a little alarmed. But she shut the door. Across
to a chair she moved. Keeping her eyes intently upon him, she raised her
forearms, with locked hands, and rested them across the corner of the
intervening desk top.
The lad continued to gaze upon her. The color of his lips was gruesome.
No word was spoken.
The clock on the wall showed seventeen minutes past eight. The night
wind blew some papers from Charley Newton’s desk in the outer office
where the door had been left open.
“Nathan! Something horrible’s happened! Can’t you tell me?”
“Milly! You know how much trouble father and I are always having around
the shop, here?”
“Yes! ’Course I know! So does everybody!”
“It’s reached the point, Milly, where I can’t stand it any longer.”
“All the fellers and girls would follow you out to a person, if you was
to ask ’em.”
“I’m especially thinking—of—home. You can imagine, can’t you, that if
dad quarrels with me here, he acts the same way at home. Well, he does,
anyhow! And I’m sick of it!”
“Then I should think you’d get out and,” she dropped her eyes, adding
unsteadily, “get a home o’ your own.”
“I—haven’t—any one—to do it with, Milly.”
His face returned to his arms. “I thought I had, but I haven’t.”
“You thought you had?”
“I thought I had, yes. But the girl went off and married somebody else.
I just learned it—to-night!”
“She couldn’t have loved you very much to do that, Nathan.”
“I suppose not! No!”
“I’m—I’m—awful sorry, Nathan! Sorry for you! If there was anything I
could do, you know I’d do it, don’t you?”
He raised his face again. His hands wandered around the desk top, as
though groping blindly.
Fog! Fog! Or perhaps he was searching for something.
“Milly, I feel like the loneliest chap on God’s earth!” Two huge tears
brimmed in his hot, hard eyes, blurred his sight, zigzagged down his
haggard, unshaven cheeks. He arose, walked to the window. The girl’s
eyes were riveted on him. When he came close to her, she only tilted her
head back to look up into his face.
“Nathan,” she lisped, “is there anything I could do to make you—happy?”
It was her soft, ample bosom which he saw heaving that brought that
constricted feeling across his own chest and words to his lips.
“I don’t know, Milly. Oh, God, I’m tired—tired!”
Milly found the strength to rise. She had seen Nat enter the office and
followed to tell him there had been a mistake of ten cents in her weekly
envelope. But it was plain she had come instead to encounter, all
unwittingly, _her_ Amethyst Moment.
She made an appealing picture, standing before the lad with wistful
solicitation on her face,—half-frightened, not knowing whether to stay
or to flee, held half by morbid curiosity, half by the titanic
possibilities of the drama. Everything about her was cheap, but was that
not because she had been denied something better—like the boy himself?
Hardly knowing that he did so, groping, the scion of the House of Forge
raised his left hand. His fingers touched the fabric of her cloak
sleeve.
He did not especially want Milly. He wanted Woman—the solacing, maternal
spirit—wanted it horribly in one of life’s great disappointments. Milly
at the moment only stood for Woman.
The girl did not shrink from his touch. She stood motionless, waiting,
with the blood dying out of her face.
The boy’s other hand found the girl’s other arm. Both his hands crept up
toward her ample shoulders.
Nathan took old Jake Richards’ daughter to his heart. And old Jake
Richards’ daughter responded somehow, frightened out of her wits.
It was twenty-one minutes past eight. The town clerk’s office would be
open until nine o’clock. The day was Saturday and taxpayers came in to
settle their assessments and water rents. There was time, then, that
night, to get a marriage license.
Nathan had no heart to take his hideous disappointment back to a home
where father and mother were still “at it.” Forever “at it.”
Milly thought it a great lark. On the way uptown her head was swimming
with the realization.
“I guess Pa and Maw ain’t got the stunning of their lives coming when
they see I’ve copped off the boss!”
VI
One night back over the years, Nathan and I had idled down the Green
River in the starlight, and the poet had dreamed dreams of his wedding
day—fantastic, vague, exotic—the wonder noon of the future all blurred
in autumn lights, laughter, love and flowers.
Fred Babcock, real-estate agent and justice of the peace, in the Norwalk
Block, tucked a small brown flask hurriedly in the bottom drawer of his
desk when he heard somebody coming up the stairs. He threw his “chew” in
the stove and nipped his finger on the hot iron door. He was shaking the
smarting hand and swearing when Nathan appeared in the doorway. There
was some one behind him.
“Mr. Babcock,” asked the boy in a strained voice, “wonder if I could get
you to perform a m-m-marriage?”
“Whose?” gaped Fred.
“Mine! Mine and Miss Richards.”
Fred looked from one to the other blankly.
“Well, of course, if it’s bad as that,” he assented. “Come in! Gawd! I
ain’t hitched nobody for so long b’darned if I know where to look for
the book.”
Milly clung to Nathan frightenedly. Her other hand held her cloak
together, for the dangling button had ceased its dangling somewhere en
route.
Fred found the book in an empty cigar box that had fallen upon a pile of
old overshoes and fishing tackle.
“B’darn! We gotta have a witness!” he declared. “An’ you gotcha license
all proper, aincher?”
Nathan could produce a license but not a witness. Fred departed to
“scare one out.” He was pleased with the prospect of making five dollars
so easily to top off the week,—just like “picking it up in the street.”
While Fred was absent, Milly and Nathan sat stiffly. Dimly in the
grief-stunned boy’s mind was a thought that by this he was going Carol
one better! Wait until she heard! Then too, he never would have to go
back to his father and mother. Milly was all right! As good as the run
of ’em! She was The Sex anyhow and had proved that she loved him. Had
she not stayed at work during the strike? Had she not gone uptown once
and brought him down a basket of supper, unasked?
Fred came back with a colored man in tow,—old Ezra Hassock, janitor for
a half-dozen Main Street blocks and tender of their nocturnal fires. He
wore white overalls and a dented felt hat. The hat had cobwebs on it,
and his hands hung from the length of his arms like smoked hams.
“Well, stand up, and we’ll have the agony over,” was the cheery way the
justice of the peace phrased it. “Gotta ring?”
“Yes,” said Nathan thickly. “I bought one when we came across the square
just now.”
“Well, grab her left lunch-hook and hang on,” was Fred’s equally jovial
way of directing the ceremonies. “You, Ezra! Take the cotton battin’ out
your ears and look like a witness!”
“Ain’t got no cotton battin’ in mah ears!” rejoined Ezra. Thereat all
present laughed. It was an excellent joke.
“_In the name of God, Amen!_”
A knife ran into Nathan’s heart. Where was Carol this moment and what
was she doing? The paper must have been mailed a week before—she had
been several days on her honeymoon already.... Carol had wanted him to
get the Harvey house in Pearl Street.... Milly’s hand was very sweaty
and hard, calloused from the pasting of many boxes.... Where had old
Ezra got so many cobwebs on his hat?... Where would he take Milly that
first night?... Where was Carol and what——
“Yes! I mean ‘I do!’” he answered anent keeping, loving and cherishing
this female in sickness and in health and all the rest of it, whatever
it was.
He was dimly conscious that he was trying to get the ring on Milly’s
finger; it didn’t fit half so well as it had in the jewelry store. Ezra
was grinning—showing ivories like an enameled picket-fence—it was
fourteen minutes after nine o’clock—Carol had said she wanted the living
room furnished in Mission——
“... I now therefore pronounce you man and wife and may God bless your
union, Amen! And it’ll cost you five bucks.”
Nathan and Milly came down into Main Street. It looked quite like Main
Street on a hundred other Saturday nights.
“Where’ll we go?” asked Milly, as they paused on the top step in front
of the Norwalk Block so as not to be jostled by the grocery-bill-paying,
Sunday-meat-buying crowd. She clung to Nathan’s arm with one hand and in
the other held her marriage certificate as though she didn’t know what
to do with it. Which she didn’t.
“I dunno!” said Nathan vaguely. “What do you want to do?”
“I want to go home and tell Ma and the kids,” returned Milly honestly.
“To think when I left the house to-night, I was coming back _married_!
My Gawd!”
They descended the four stone steps and were obliterated at once in the
serpentine sidewalk traffic of hopeless mediocrity.
BOOK TWO
SUNSHINE GLORIOUS
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER I
TOO EASY MONEY
I
Regardless of the chagrin the reminder often cost its womenfolk, the
foundation for the Ruggles family “Money” had been laid in the junk
business. Junk. Exactly. Junk!
Jasper Ruggles, the grandfather, had started life as one of those
peddlers who drove about New England in a cart resembling a small-sized
circus wagon of flaming scarlet. He swapped tinware with farmers’ wives
for rags and old metal and never got cheated. From gathering old metal
was but a step to melting it. From melting was but another step to
finding a manufactured product. So an iron works had flourished
following the Civil War and canny investments had done the rest.
Amos Ruggles, Gordon’s father, called himself a barrister,—not a lawyer,
but a barrister! He maintained an expensive suite of offices in one of
the most prominent Springfield buildings, but no one had ever heard of
his trying a case and among his fellow attorneys he was considered more
or less of a joke. He looked after the family “investments” and dabbled
in politics. Six months of the year he spent traveling, principally in
Europe, where he demonstrated what Americans are not like at home, even
at their worst.
In appearance, Amos Ruggles was a tall, ample-girthed immaculately clad
man with a certain over-clean whiteness about him, a whiteness that
looked unhealthy. He suggested he had been kept away from sunlight until
his flesh had become bleached. His thin, silky-fine white hair was
combed from the back of his head forward, and he had a perpetually
surprised look in his eye as though forever startled at finding himself
alive and asking, “Bless my stars! Where am I, anyhow?” He had another
look on his face, a look of always being on the point of saying
something tremendously important but never quite bringing himself to do
it.
His political experience to date had been but a single term in the
legislature. Certain questionable “interests” who wanted a “perfect
dummy” in the place had been responsible, not Amos’s solicitude for the
welfare of the laboring classes and his brilliant defense of the
Constitution, as he had always assumed. During this single term, his
Bills were versatile if not always feasible. Among those especially
demonstrating the man’s brilliance may be cited (1) A Bill—to mitigate
social conditions by making it a penal offense for laborers earning less
than a thousand a year to have more than two children; (2) A Bill—making
it a criminal violation to alight from moving street cars while facing
in the wrong direction. His bills were quietly killed in committee.
Still, they were good bills and if they had gone through, Amos felt that
he would not have lived wholly in vain. His intentions were good, at any
rate, even if the execution of his legislation may have presented
difficulties insurmountable.
Margaret Ruggles, his wife, was a Theddon and even as a girl had been so
wealthy she could afford to be homely. She came from “Boston and Rhode
Island,” as the local society reporters quoted it, making it sound like
a railroad.
In later life Margaret Ruggles’s nerve was iron and her _savoir faire_
flawless. Rumor had it that she instructed Amos how and when to do
everything, from selling United Fruit Common to changing his waistcoat.
And a local grocer had a yarn about having sent a special team out to
the Ruggleses residence to deliver three lemons, and Margaret had
ordered the man to wait and take back two of them because cook had
discovered there were already two lemons in the house. She was a close
buyer and a difficult customer and yet young Gordon—only child of these
two—was allowed, from earliest boyhood, to spend money like a Monte
Cristo in knickers. At three he cried for the moon but was given the
earth instead, and found it so absorbing that he never gave it back. Not
even when other people wanted it.
Gordon had never gone to school three consecutive years in his life. He
had never shown interest in anything for two consecutive days, in his
life,—except fighting. Yet he even refused to make fighting a business,
or he might have turned out a notable pugilist or worked his
bellicosities off to some good purpose in the Army.
Amos and Margaret absolutely refused to credit their son with faults.
They looked at him and beheld that he had a body, a brain, a temperament
and an appetite. But faults? Not a one! He committed indiscretions,
irresponsibilities, sowed a few wild oats, perhaps! But that was to be
expected. Why should he work when the Ruggleses already had more money
than they could ever spend? Besides, why should he work when he wouldn’t
work and they couldn’t make him work, even if they wanted? That he would
ultimately “go in for something” as his father had “gone in” for law—and
foreign travel—was vaguely understood. But the insinuation that Gordon
was one whit worse than a million other boys they would not tolerate an
instant. The Ruggleses—second generation—had a queer outlook on life,
one which it is perhaps difficult for _hoi polloi_ to understand: The
world was their personal bootjack and any one who essayed to question
that fact was a “disturbing element” and “a menace against established
institutions.”
Nevertheless, Gordon at twenty-six was giving Amos not a little anxiety.
While a few wild oats were expected of a boy to show that he was a boy
and virile—in fact, Amos had rolled in a wild oat or two himself when a
boy or when his wife was occasionally elsewhere—it didn’t necessarily
follow that the son should turn wholesale agriculturist and rear
elevators with the family money in which to house his disturbing grain
crops. Not that it offended Amos’s sense of decency—the things he had to
pay for, from broken china to broken women—so much as it affected the
family prestige. It was time the boy calmed down, and the boy gave no
symptoms whatever of calming down. He had, in fact, calmed upward
considerably of late and grown a little out of hand,—if indeed he ever
was in hand. Thereat Amos, like most of his type, looking into his own
experience for solution, hit upon the brilliant idea that what Gordon
needed most of all to straighten him out was a brainy, strong-minded
wife. The very thing. Gordon must have a wife. Then a baby or two. If a
baby or two couldn’t tone Gordon down then nothing could tone Gordon
down. Amos would speak to his son about it.
Which, on a winter’s evening in March, 1915, he did. Gordon was talking
about going to France and “guttin’ Fritzies” for the fun of it, and that
must be nipped at any cost. Why, the boy might get shot. Amos was
especially peeved at the Germans and the war, anyhow—it was making a
continental colander out of all his favorite watering places and
spoiling his annual trips abroad by filling the seas with submarines
that actually blew people up. Not that Gordon cared anything about the
moral aspects of the war. Such a venture merely promised a new thrill.
Amos called his boy into the big Ruggles library, had a Scotch and soda
with him, lighted a big cigar and assumed a place on the hearth rug with
one hand behind his coat tails. There he rocked on his toes and heels
and became the Declaiming Parent.
II
“Marry!” cried Gordon. “Who the devil will I marry? Those I might marry
I don’t want—I can have ’em any old day. And those I do want I can’t
have, because they won’t have me. So damn all women, anyhow.”
“Tut, tut, sir!” cried Amos. “Your mother is a woman, understand!”
“Gad, so she is! Well, well! We’ll make an exception of her. Damn all
the others—excepting——”
“I’d like to know,” declaimed Amos grandly, as he had expounded his
two-child-a-family bill before the legislature, “I’d like to know, sir,
where the woman is you might want that you can’t have? Tut, tut, sir! Do
not let us fritter away our time with nonsense.”
“If you want to know straight, Pop, there’s only one skirt in these
whole United States I could ever care two hamstrings for. But she’s
about as interested in me as that Frances Willard dame would be to sit
in on a bock-beer convention.”
“Ah! Then you have felt the possibilities in the grand passion? And may
I have the lady’s name, sir? We shall see what can be done about it.”
“It’s that girl of Aunt Grace’s—Madelaine!”
“What, sir? What? The brat from the orphanage?”
“Believe me, Pop, she’s a long throw from being a brat. I guess you
haven’t seen her lately.”
“Not for half a dozen years, sir, I haven’t seen her. Went to college,
didn’t she? To be a lady doctor, or something?”
“She’s in Medical School now. She graduated from Radcliffe this past
June. And you can take it from me, Pop, she’s _there_!”
“But, my God, sir! Do you mean to sit there and insinuate that a brat
from an orphanage—a Nobody!—refuses to look with favor on the suit of a
Ruggles? She cannot understand who you are, sir! You cannot have asked
her seriously. Have you asked her, by the way? Have you? Seriously?”
“No. And I haven’t asked the King of Belgium to come over here and take
a job driving my Stutz, either. There are some things that simply aren’t
done.”
“But what has she against you, especially? Doesn’t the girl realize
she’s a Nobody? Doesn’t she see how she could improve her social
position by marrying my son—a Ruggles?”
“She doesn’t give a hoot for anybody’s social position. Not even her
own. She’s class, Pop, with a capital C. If you could see her as she’s
grown up now, you’d understand and close the door softly as you go out.
I’ve got as much chance of making a hit with her as the Czar of Russia
stands of being elected recording secretary of the Forest Park Home
Improvement and Loan Society.”
“Do I understand you to say, sir, you want this girl—that you’d marry
her, and settle down if she’d have you?”
“Will a duck swim?”
“We are not discussing ducks, sir. We are discussing women! This is most
interesting and enlightening. We will look into this matter. Yes, we
certainly will look into the matter. At once!”
Which Amos Ruggles at once set about. As John Alden for his boy, he was
one of the most efficient steam fitters who ever tackled a job and had
to go back for his tools while a boiler exploded.
III
Having nothing of larger consequence to attend upon, that week, Amos
took a mighty trip to Boston to interview the “brat from the Orphanage”
on behalf of his beloved offspring.
Madelaine, strange as the statement may appear, had never met Amos
Ruggles. Rising hastily now from her book-littered desk, she beheld her
maid admit to her outer sitting room a very carefully groomed,
white-faced, fastidiously caned and perfectly spatted elderly man who
wore a red carnation in his buttonhole and a Facial Expression prepared
for the worst.
But Madelaine’s interest was not to be compared with old “Am’s” stunned
surprise when he raised his owlish eyes and saw “the brat from the
Orphanage” confronting him from the opposite doorway. Subconsciously
Amos had failed to conceive of that brat as anything but a brat.
Certainly not a woman grown to maturity. Up to the moment of admittance
he had looked vaguely forward to interviewing a knock-kneed child in
pigtails and a gingham apron. He had once visited an orphanage while on
a legislative committee. He had come away impressed that the crying need
of the institution at the moment was to have its individual and
collective nose wiped.
Instead of such a mite of parentless humanity whom he might pat on the
head and suggest peanuts to, the man confronted a tall, perfectly
poised, athletic young woman whose calm eyes made him wonder if he had
rumpled himself anywhere in that hectic two-hour trip on the Boston and
Albany.
For an instant Amos felt petulant. Persons unknown had tricked him. For
Madge Theddon was grown into a “goddess.” The metaphor is Amos’s. And
she “had a way with her.” Yes, she had very much of a way with her. One
of her fellow students had described her: “Calm as a mountain thinking
aloud; ineligible for analysis as moonlight playing on a nocturnal
waterfall.”
“I am Madelaine, yes!” she announced in response to “Am’s” suggestion
that there was a mistake somewhere. “You are my mother’s brother-in-law.
I am very glad to make your acquaintance, Mr. Ruggles.” She moved
forward, extending a lithe, cool, capable hand.
Amos took the hand and kissed it, or he believed he kissed it, at the
same time annoyed that she had called him her mother’s brother-in-law
instead of her own uncle.
“Madam, charmed!” And Amos made another bow. But he was not charmed. He
was bumped. He was badly bumped! There was not a doubt about it.
With an amused smile, Madelaine’s maid withdrew. Amos produced a billowy
silk handkerchief and began patting various exposed portions of his
anatomy. He ran out of exposed portions and then accepted the chair
Madelaine indicated, still in his imbecilic daze.
“Y-Y-You may think it strange that I have called, Miss Madel—Miss
Madel—Miss Theddon—it is about my son. You two have become quite well
acquainted in the past, I understand.”
“Quite,” returned the girl. Her tone was a trifle ironic.
Amos was at a loss.
“Yes, yes! True, true—very true.” Came another distressing pause while
Amos considered. “You see, it’s like this, Miss Madel—Miss Madel—Miss
Theddon—getting along famously, are we not?—nothing could please his
mother and myself just now more than the knowledge that he is married
and—safely in the hands of some good and firm-willed woman. And
so—beautiful apartment you have here!—I decided I would come down and
talk it over with you.”
“I see,” Madelaine responded. “You’ve come to enlist my aid, perhaps, in
finding a wife for Gordon. Or my advice as to how to proceed; which is
it?”
“Well—er—in fact, a little of both and none of either.” Amos was happily
growing more at ease. He stored his handkerchief in his outside breast
pocket, left a couple of inches exposed, put his pink, manicured finger
tips precisely together between his knees.
“The idea is this, Miss Madelaine. The boy is—well—the boy is—deeply
impressed by yourself and—purely as a father—with a father’s paternal
interest, understand—I have called to appraise for myself the extent of
the gulf between you and—get you to consider the matter for—er—early
negotiation.”
“What matter? Just what do you mean?”
“The matter, Miss Madelaine, of—er—becoming his—wife!”
Amos breathed once more. The worst was over.
Madelaine could not control the flush that crept toward her temples.
“Did Gordon ask that you do this?” she demanded.
“Not at all! Not at all! The idea is my own entirely—absolutely my own!”
Amos inferred that as an idea it certainly had its points and on the
whole he was rather proud of it.
“Then Gordon knows nothing of it?”
“Not a whittle, Miss Madelaine, not a whittle.”
The girl sat for a time in silence. Her emotions were resentful. They
wanted to riot. Her lips twitched once or twice. Then came a saving
sense of humor.
“Just why should I consider a marriage with your son, Mr. Ruggles? On
what basis do you rear that contention?”
“I—er—I——”
Madelaine pitied his sudden distress. For the first time in his life
Amos Ruggles appreciated that any reference to the Ruggles wealth would
be crude and insulting, before such a woman as he confronted now.
“He’s a—he’s a—mighty fine boy, Miss Madelaine!” was the father’s
compromise.
“I apologize if I seem rude, Mr. Ruggles. But that must remain a matter
of opinion.”
“You mean—he isn’t a mighty fine boy?”
“Must we discuss him—his good points and his bad?”
“But he has no bad points, my dear lady. Of course, during adolescence
he has been virile and erratic and perhaps indulged himself in some few
indiscretions common to all boys. Why, I have even passed through such a
stage myself. But there’s nothing really bad about him—nothing but what
a characterful wife could eventually eradicate.”
“Mr. Ruggles, has Gordon ever recounted how very ungentlemanly—in fact,
grossly insulting—his conduct toward myself has been consistently—from
the moment of our first meeting?”
Incredulity, a flick of exasperation, now passed over Amos Ruggles’s
features. There was a certain trick of intonation in Madelaine’s voice
which quashed irrevocably any argument that Gordon had not been
ungentlemanly and insulting. And yet Amos was not quite willing to
subscribe to that. And argument was cheapening.
“Just how has he acted—what has he done?”
“You really wish me to tell you?”
“I should consider it in the light of a very great favor, my dear lady.”
Madelaine considered. She leaned back in the chair and put two slender
fingers of each hand at a temple, her dark eyes fixed appraisingly upon
her foster-uncle.
Then she told him.
She began with Gordon’s conduct and language the day ten years before,
when he had violated the privacy of her bedroom. That was insipid,
however, beside the later indignities she had suffered. She gave a
truthful account of each situation when he had taken her at a
disadvantage, forced himself upon her, defiled her lips or tried to
compromise her still more seriously. The night of the bogus auto
accident became but an incident in that sordid recount. The most brazen
piece of insult and effrontery had been a night in a Boston hotel when
Gordon had followed her, secured a room next to her own and bought a
mercenary night clerk to let him scratch the girl’s name from the
register and substitute “Mr. and Mrs. Gordon Ruggles” instead. He then
added the consecutive room numbers as a suite. Cheap witnesses had been
procured to substantiate that Madelaine had apparently gone to Boston,
met Gordon clandestinely and shared an apartment with him for a night.
With his citadel of crazy folly thus garrisoned, the foster-nephew had
brazenly offered the girl the alternative of marriage or exposure, and
only an astute lawyer had contrived to squelch the scandal without
publicity.
Amos was dumbfounded. She waited for him to comment. But he held his
peace. Then Madelaine laughed good-naturedly.
“And after such persecution—I hope you’ll permit me to call it that, Mr.
Ruggles—ten or twelve years of it!—you come to me and suggest I marry
your son because he’s really ‘not such a bad fellow, after all!’”
“Don’t you believe—a good woman—can reform a man?” Amos demanded
quickly.
“That all depends on the man. In some cases, absolutely not. The
material must first be there to work upon. As a general proposition, I
consider it thankless nonsense. There may be some good men who have been
bruised and buffeted and almost wrecked by life’s cruellest
vicissitudes. They may have lost their moorings and their faith in human
nature. All they require is kind and loving care, and tenderness and
proper ministration to bring them back to normal. In so far as that is
‘reform’, I believe it possible and admirable and well worth the effort.
But taking a man who has never had a care or worry and whose career has
been one long fling in self-indulgence, and endeavoring to make a man of
him—the woman who will waste her time trying it displays evidences of
imbecility.”
“Then I take it—there’s no hope—for Gordon?”
“I haven’t said so. I’ve said that Gordon, or any man who wants my
respect and ministration, must prove to me first that, in popular
language, he’s ‘got the stuff in him.’ I’ll say this much: When your son
Gordon has proved to me he’s sincerely penitent and made of the material
that perhaps hasn’t had a fair chance to develop, he stands as good a
chance to gain my favor as any man. That’s all the ‘encouragement’ I can
give. Just now I’ve too much to occupy my time to think of matrimony,
anyway. It doesn’t enter into my plans. I’m studying to be a physician.”
“Yes, yes, I know! Very commendable. I wish Gordon had some interest in
life—some——”
“I’ll even go further, Mr. Ruggles. I’ll say that all the vulgarity and
insult which I’ve suffered consistently from your son will not handicap
him if he turns over a new leaf and shows he’s really made of stuff
worth while. In fact, I’d be inclined to count it in his favor, strange
as it may sound. For it will be a criterion of what he has overcome.”
“Thank you,” said Amos. “Thank you very much!”
IV
All the week that call of Gordon’s father perturbed Madelaine. Or
rather, it accentuated emotions which the nature of her activities and
the demands upon her time were forcibly keeping latent.
She had reached twenty-four and was still heart-free. Yet there were
times when she distrusted herself. She wanted to shed tears without
exactly knowing why. She felt herself groping out for a Something she
could not give a name? Was it love? It troubled her.
She had met men, all types and varieties and temperaments. She had
golfed with them, danced with them, ridden with them, crossed social
swords with them at house parties and on yacht cruises. She had looked
at them frankly and fearlessly; assayed them; asked herself with a cold
brain if she could think of herself as wife to any of them,—with all
which wifehood, to a girl like herself, implied. The answer had always
been negative, from repulsion or indifference. She mothered them, she
sistered them, she heard their troubles, she even allowed a few of the
elect to flirt with her,—in a harmless, blue-blooded way. But as for
meeting a man in whose personality she could abandon herself, whom she
could tolerate beside her always, in every situation that life might
hold, most of all in its great privacies, there had never been such a
man. She wondered at times if there would be.
The young architect had gone to the Argentine. For a time he had
corresponded with her. She felt a queer little pang and breathed a sigh
when news came back one autumn of his marriage to the daughter of an
American consul. There had been a young artist whom she had met in
Paris. He had grasped her roughly in his arms one night and covered her
face and throat with kisses. Strange to relate, she had felt neither
insult nor repulsion. But she had discovered him a week later doing the
same with another woman. She had laughed a queer little laugh and
considered herself the butt of a rather good jest.
She and her mother had completed their world trip; had come back across
America; and she had begun her college studies. She had counseled other
girls’ love affairs. She had been bridesmaid at many weddings. She had
beheld love in all its wealth of tenderness and idealism; and she had
seen it defiled and degraded to brutish lust. She knew what love could
do, that it was very beautiful and much to be desired. Yet she had a
feeling that when she loved, it would be with a force and passion that
would melt down the world—her world—and recast it. She must proceed
carefully and tolerate no blunders.
The name “Old Mother Hubbard” still clung to her. She could not always
approach her medical studies in that cold, impersonal way she felt was
necessary for professional success. Human beings were always human
beings, never biological cases for the application of abstract logic or
the working out of a theorem. At times she wondered if she were
constituted to make a success of medicine, particularly obstetrics. She
almost believed a course in nursing would have supplied that hunger in
her heart to alleviate suffering. But there were so many nurses—the life
was at times so proscribed and mechanical——
It was queer that Amos Ruggles had chosen that particular time to make
his call. Because a month before, her roommate of the past year had
suddenly abandoned her studies to become a wife, had written back from
Japan how much her life had been changed and enriched, contending that
the course which Madelaine had elected was unnatural and would never
wholly bring her Woman Happiness. That hurt most of all. Because of late
Madelaine had begun to doubt it herself. And yet, marrying Gordon!
Anybody but Gordon!
The fellow had a dread influence over her. She could not describe it. It
was cruelly mesmeric. It seemed to have persisted, in spite of all the
man’s behavior, since the first day she had beheld his hot young gaze
upon her. He had challenged her foster-mother that in the end he would
win her, by fair means or foul. Consistently through the past decade he
had kept in touch with her. Something in his eyes declared, “Fight as
much as you wish, my pretty lady; I’ll have my way in the end.” Now it
was plain that Gordon wanted her, as a man; he must have conveyed that
desire to his family or Amos never would have made his call. If Gordon
persisted long enough, would he break through her defenses and bear her
away in spite of herself? No, no, no!
Romance! What was romance?
The girl went back to her study table and tried to continue her thesis.
It was banal and lifeless and drab.
Romance! What was romance!
She threw down her fountain pen and cupped her cheeks with her hands.
Straight before her on the wall was a long, narrow, copper-hued frame.
Inside it, a liberal expanse of brown mapping. In the center of the
mapping was a faded strip of news-print.
Why was she saving that poem? Who was Nathaniel Forge and why should he
write such a poem?
Unconsciously she read over the lines again. And when she had come to
the name signed at the bottom, Madelaine Theddon did a strange thing,
for Madelaine Theddon. That wonder who Nathaniel Forge might be, and why
he should have written such a poem, started her thoughts romancing. That
romancing crystallized in a concrete decision. What harm could there be
in making a trip up to this Paris, Vermont, in the week of vacation
beginning Monday, and learning what she might of Nathaniel Forge—even
looking into his face, perhaps—provided she did not declare her identity
or divulge her errand?
The more she thought about it, the more the novelty of the proposal grew
upon her. She had saved that poem so long, it had meant so much, that
she wanted that wonderment answered.
Could it be possible that Kismet had ordained that the poem purposely
should find its way into her life for a beautiful purpose? She would
see. Why not?
She put away her ponderous books with their long, italicized words and
abstruse meanings. She would go to Paris, Vermont, that following
Monday, telling no one.
V
Madelaine arrived in our town at four o’clock of a drab, depressing
winter’s afternoon. The weather was treacherously balmy. The snow was
thin, hard-packed and dirty. Paris in no other season of year looked
less attractive or more mediocre. She alighted from the Junction train
and walked down the length of the station platform with a little dread.
Did she want to know about Nathaniel Forge, after all? Did she really
want to see him? Suppose he was hopeless, that the poem had simply been
a trick of circumstance and coincidence? Would it not be better to let
him remain ever as she had idealized him, whoever and whatever he was,
perhaps the One-Who-Might-Have-Been. Then she condemned herself for an
emotional, sentimental little weakling, afraid to face facts. She
wandered up Depot Street to East Main, carrying a light traveling bag,
looking for the hotel.
In her trim tailored suit of green worsted and small mannish hat, she
resembled a hundred traveling saleswomen or demonstration women of the
better class. Half a dozen drummers so “placed” her before she had been
in the Whitney House ten minutes. With a room secured, she started out
to see the town.
The town! She wandered up one side of Main Street and down the other.
She saw a jumble of drab, discouraged, discordant, chaotic blocks and
buildings such as border Main Street in every town of ten thousand
inhabitants from the Presidio to Plymouth Rock. Its people were a
painfully self-conscious, muddy-shoed procession of everybody not
mentioned in Who’s Who and never likely to be mentioned in Who’s Who.
The sky was smothered with depressing mist. It shut out the distant
mountain sky line. The sordidness and commonness of the community
grated—horribly.
A single-track car line wound through Main Street, not much caring
whether cars went over it or not. The People’s National Bank, the Bishop
Jewelry with the sidewalk clock that was never correct, Joe Service’s
News Room, Edwards Brothers’ Cigar Store, The Red Front Grocery, the
Michalman Misses-and-Ladies-Suits, the Bon Ton Millinery, the Woolworth
Five-and-Ten, the _Daily Telegraph_ office with bulletins about the
latest developments on the Somme, the Masonic Temple, the Y. M. C. A.,
Williams Clothing Emporium,—a thousand towns had them and would always
have them until America ceased to be. She was glad she possessed a sense
of humor. And yet what a dispirited, uninteresting, plodding sort of
existence. The plainness and crudity of everything bothered her. It was
piteous.
She saw a greasy barber shop next door to the Élite Lunch Room with a
fly-speckled sign in the window of the latter: “Eat Here or We Both
Starve.” She caught glimpses of rakishly barbered heads moving about
pool tables behind a foggy window filled with wrestling-match placards
and announcements of dance carnivals. A basket of eggs marked “Fresh at
17c” was set down close to the glass in the window of the Metropolitan
Drug Store. A small boy with an enormous fur cap clanked the iron
tie-ring in front of a gift shop with a torn awning. A washed-out woman
in a hideous hat waited in a sleigh while her husband smoked a five-cent
cigar and then came to untie the huge-rumped horse with his big fingers
and take his place beside her beneath a ponderous buffalo robe. A long
curb-line of carefully groomed young bucks with no place to go but home
assayed her figure as she passed in front of the Olympic Movie and
commented about her ankles.
She stopped in front of the hotel again and tried to decide what one
thing was the keynote to the place and its people. She finally decided
it must be the dilapidated Ford truck with a torn and dirty horse
blanket thrown over its radiator. The truck was left, headed into the
curb in a hay-strewn gutter, in front of the Atlantic and Pacific Tea
Store. A flock of pigeons about it were being extremely bothered by the
sidewalk traffic.
Madelaine was neither prig nor snob. Yet she wondered how people could
possibly pass all their lives in such a place. Especially she pitied the
women. She went inside the hotel at last and found that the “Ladies’
Parlor” overlooked the street. Before she made any inquiries as to
Nathan, she sank into one of the rockers. As she meditated, with a
little ache of excitement in her heart, other scenes came to her,—scenes
she unconsciously compared with the lot of the town’s women here. The
first lamps of evening blinked on and found her still meditating.
The shape of a hansom clopping through the London fog; a careless laugh
floating back on a French boulevard in the hush of a soft, spring night;
evening on the Grand Canal with the eternal slap, slap, slap of the
water and the memory of a weird song mixed with the musty decay of old
palaces; blue-toned Greece where the landscapes were as clear and sharp
as far-flung cameos of mountain size; the heat-soaked Holy Land; Sunday
morning from the Mount of Olives; breakfast in a Persian camp; noon on a
Chinese river; twilight and a Japanese moon riding mystic above
eucalyptus trees,—what did the women of such a landlocked little town
know of the world’s beauties and its far places? Or the men either? The
men! Who was Nathaniel Forge and why should he have written such a poem?
She wondered if she was beginning to understand.
She had no appetite for dinner—they called it supper up here, she
supposed—at least in the dining room where all the first arrivals would
leer at her. She went back down to the lobby and approached Pat Whitney,
the proprietor.
“I wonder if you could assist me,” she said, “in finding a certain type
of person in this town for whom I’m looking,”
Pat did not remove his two-inch toothpick. He did try to button his
vest.
“Shoot, lady!” he answered.
Madelaine smiled to herself, then “shot.”
“I’d like to be directed to some elderly man or woman who has lived a
long time here and is acquainted with most of the town’s people.
Especially those who lived here about ten years ago. I’m hunting a
friend. Yet I don’t want my business made public. I’d prefer some
elderly, accommodating man——”
“That’s a cinch!” returned Pat. “Skin around the corner and see Uncle
Joe Fodder.”
“Uncle Joe Fodder?”
“Yeah; he runs the livery stable. He knows everybody from way back, who
their grandmothers was and what the family et for supper the night they
was born.”
“That’s very good of you,” returned Madelaine. And she thanked him.
“I’m all yours, Missie,” was Pat’s rejoinder. He meant no offense. He
dealt so with all the “lady drummers”.
Madelaine picked her way into the puddle-dotted, straw-strewn livery
yard. A single light burned over the big stable door. Another shone
through the murky windowpanes of a tiny office at the left.
Three men were in that office with a kindly old fellow who looked
exactly as William Cullen Bryant might have looked if William Cullen
Bryant had conducted a livery stable in one Vermont community for half a
century. He wore a blue gingham shirt, patched trousers and soiled
suspenders. But Madelaine liked his eyes.
“Mr. Fodder?” the girl asked.
Three jaws lowered. Three pairs of eyes stared. Three pairs of front
chair legs clumped to the floor. Taking their cue, three specimens of
bewhiskered humanity “hoofed along ’bout their business.”
“Mr. Whitney at the hotel sent me to you,” Madelaine declared when they
were alone and the soft-eyed old philosopher had dusted a chair and
pushed the “spit-box” from sight. “He said you were well acquainted in
Paris and could assist me in getting information about a particular
person who may, or may not, live here at present. My name is
Howland—Allegra Howland—and I come from Springfield, Mass. But my visit
here and my business must remain unknown. I’d like you to assure me
you’ll keep it confidential before I go further.”
The old man stroked his whiskers gently and his blue eyes smiled.
“Pat claimed I knowed everybody, did he? Wal, wal! He does manage to
tell the truth once in a dog’s age. What is it you want to know,
daughter?”
“It’s about a man named Forge. Has such a man ever lived here in Paris?”
Madelaine caught the startled expression which for a moment chilled the
kindly laughter in those lackluster eyes.
“Which Forge, daughter? Nat or the old man?”
“There are two, then?”
“Nat and Johnathan. Nat’s the boy. Johnathan’s the dad. Which you want
to know about?”
“The one called Nathaniel. He—he—several years ago—he—wrote a poem. It
interested me greatly. So much so I thought if I ever happened up this
way, I’d stop and compliment the poet.”
“Pshaw, now! That’s too bad!”
“Why is it too bad?”
The expression of trouble deepened on the old hostler’s face.
“It’s been quite a spell since Nat writ poetry. His dad sort o’
discouraged it. Nat give it up.”
“He’s a young man, then?” Why did the girl’s heart leap?
“Let’s see, Nat was ten or so when he come to Paris from over Foxboro
way. That was in ninety-nine. Now it’s nineteen-fifteen. That’d make
Natie ’bout twenty-six at present, wouldn’t it?—yaas, twenty-six!”
“He’s still living here, then?”
“Yaas—he’s still livin’ here. Just now, we’re sort o’ sorry to say, he’s
livin’ in jail.”
“In—_jail_!”
It was a diaphragm blow. Madelaine could hear, see, feel, but she could
not move. “Why is he in jail?” she asked faintly.
“It’s a long story, ma’am. ’Tain’t exactly a pleasant one. You see, Nat
come down here from Foxboro and his old man started a shoe place over
next to the Red Front Grocery. Him and his woman always had trouble and
I guess ‘twa sort o’ hell for the Forge kids. Nat went to school here a
piece, and then was pulled out and set to work for Gridley to the
tannery. Old Cal took pity on him, the boy bein’ a good sort o’ kid, and
put him in the office. Nat writ poems just after leavin’ school. They
tickled old Gridley. He got Hod to print ’em in the _Telegraph_.”
“Gridley? Why, I know a girl named Gridley! And she came from up around
here, too. She went to school with me at Mount Hadley.”
“That’s the one! Bernice! Went abroad for a spell, didn’t she? Then
married a millionaire feller from somewhere out Chicawgie?”
“Yes,” said Madelaine faintly. “Please go on! It was her father, then.
And what about Nathaniel?”
“Well, Johnathan got sick o’ cobblin’ folkses’ shoes. Had a chance to
buy Dink Campbell’s box-shop. Didn’t do very well till young Nat got
stuck on a girl from A-higher. Commenced workin’ like the devil then,
Nat did, to get a stake so’s he could marry her. Caleb coached him, I
guess. Leastwise the town says so, and Cal ain’t never denied it. That
was ’fore his woman, the Duchess, died, and Cal started travelin’.
Anyhow, Nat worked like sixty down to the box-shop and planned when he
was twenty-one he’d marry the kid from A-higher. It was sort o’ too bad.
She give him the Grand Bounce, married another feller. Pore Natie got it
square between the eyes the night he turned twenty-one. He was plannin’
on marryin’ her the comin’ Christmas. Rotten deal! Hurt him awful!”
Madelaine’s throat was dry. She nodded.
“Care if I smoke, daughter?” the old man asked.
“Please do,” begged the girl. He was that type of picturesque old fellow
who looks at a loss without a corncob pipe. Uncle Joe pulled a package
of black shag from his hip, took his cob from off his desk and for
several moments meditated as he applied the shag to the bowl and tamped
it hard with a gnarled forefinger.
“’Course,” he went on, as the match flame leaped several times upon
being applied to the top of the pipe, “it’s only natcheral that Natie
should ‘a’ been sort of upset and all. Still, we didn’t calculate he’d
turn so quick and crazy-like, and pull off the stunt he did. I s’pose he
was just homesick for a woman, his Ma being pretty much a jawbones and
the home life at sixes and sevens. Anyhow, that very night when Natie
learned the other girl had married another feller, he goes plumb to work
and marries ‘Cock-eye’ Richards’ eldest girl, Milly—the dumpy one that
was always sloppy ’bout her shoes.”
“Married! He’s—married—then?”
“Oh, yaas, he’s married. Got a kid—girl kid! Been married—let’s see—been
married better’n five year now. Kid’s pretty good size. Goes to school,
I think.”
“Go on,” said the girl listlessly. “You said he was in jail.”
“Yaas—box-shop’s busted—high, wide and handsome.”
“Just how do you mean?”
“Well, Nat got going pretty good there, for a piece. He was working for
a stake to marry the A-higher girl like I said, and when a kid’s got his
back up to do something big for a girl, there’s times when a team o’
hosses can’t hold him. He was keen enough, too, for a kid. He’d probably
come out all right if he hadn’t been sidetracked by marryin’ that dumpy
Richards thing. Anyhow, he’d had the business incorporated and hittin’
the high spots and it was making so much money for a spell that lots o’
folks hereabouts bought stock. Bought some myself! But it reached its
peak the first year o’ Nat’s marriage. Guess the boy lost heart. Then
again, his old man give him trouble. What John didn’t know about
business, any kind of business, would fill a dam’ big book. So they
pulled and they hauled and they sawed, and with a baby comin’, the boy
couldn’t very well break away. Then him and Milly didn’t get along—him
bein’ a poet and she bein’ a cow. Taken altogether, the box-works
commenced to slide.”
“And now it’s reached bankruptcy?”
“’Twouldn’t have gone into bankruptcy if old John hadn’t had one last
walloper of a fight with his woman, and one mornin’ showed up missin’.
The girl Edith—that’s Nat’s sister—she holds out for marryin’ a feller
by the name o’ Dubois—French feller from Montreal. Folks objected, her
folks. They objected so much she ran off with him one night and the old
man couldn’t have the marriage busted ’cause there was a fambly comin’.
John’s woman got scrappin’ and blamin’ him for makin’ a mess o’ things
generally and so, well—last week he simply pulled his stakes and
blowed.”
“But why should they put the son in jail?”
“Wal, seems Johnathan got the idea from somewheres that because he was
president and had started the business, it belonged to him, ‘specially
the funds. He forgot there was stockholders been interested. He gets
peeved and draws out a rotten lot o’ the company’s workin’ capital.
Cripples it so it can’t pay its bills. He takes it with him, and God
knows where he’s gone. The bank folks here certainly’d like to. The
stockholders get together and bein’ pretty hot under the collar and all,
they thinks Nat might blow too, and they claps him in the hoosegow. The
bank puts figgerers ont’ the books and they found the shop’s been losing
money for most three years—just eatin’ into its capital and eatin’ and
eatin’. John’s skippin’ out sorter pulled down the temple. The boy’s
helpless, ’cause they set his bail so high there won’t nobody go it,
though they do say old Caleb in California, or somewheres, has wired
he’d come back and lend a hand to straighten things out. But there ain’t
much hope o’ re-openin’ the business. Won’t pay fifteen cents on the
dollar. Feel like a fool about it myself. Had in fifty dollars.”
“And how does his mother and wife take it?” Madelaine asked. Not that
she particularly cared, but she had to say something.
“Oh, John’s woman’s mad at the boy; she and Milly don’t get along. Then
agin, Nat got into the mess by bein’ in business with his father—and
Anna always did hate his father. She owns the Longstreet property up on
Vermont Avenue—leastwise it was put in her name a while back and the
courts can’t get it. She could go Nat’s bail if she would. But she
won’t. She says it’s ‘good enough for him.’ Let him rot in jail a piece
and think it over. Good revenge on John, Nat bein’ his son. It’s makin’
a heap o’ talk ’round the village. Milly—Gawd, she ain’t got brains
enough to boil water; all she can do is wring her hands and weep. Folks
say a chap named Si Plumb is shinin’ around her—used to be in love with
her before she married Nat. But I’m thinkin’ that’s talk. No, the boy
ain’t got much help from his women folks. Never did have, for that
matter. Sad case, sad case!”
“What became of the sister?”
“She’s off up to Montreal. Dubois got a job up there in a paper mill.
Ordinary sort o’ feller—makes two-seventy-five a day, maybe.”
Old Fodder puffed on his pipe for a time. Madelaine could hear his
horses munching their evening oats out in the low-studded stable.
Finally she drew a deep sigh.
“Then I guess it would be somewhat embarrassing for me to congratulate
him on his poetry just now, wouldn’t it? Satisfy a woman’s curiosity,
Mr. Fodder. What sort of looking man is he? I’ve drawn a picture of him
from his poem and I’d like to know how far I’m correct.”
“Fair-lookin’ chap!” Uncle Joe poised his shining pipe-stem in mid-air.
“Had a fight with this Plumb who they sez is sashayin’ round his wife,
just now—long time ago. Got a busted ear. Used to have fifty million
freckles but them sort o’ faded out. Been goin’ about the village sort
o’ seedy-lookin’ lately—guess his woman spent a pile, thinkin’ he had
gobs o’ money. Got fair eyes, but sort o’ hounded-lookin’. Yes, fair
sort o’ feller but kinda ordinary. Feel sorry for him myself.”
Madelaine laughed. She affected an indifference she did not feel.
“I’m awfully obliged to you, Mr. Fodder. This information has
forestalled an awkward situation. And you’ll forget I came to see you,
won’t you?”
“Sartin! Sartin! Stoppin’ in the place long?”
“No, I’m going down-country to-night.”
“Well, glad to metcher. Ever stoppin’ here again, look me up. Want me to
say anythin’ to Nat ’bout you callin’, if he wins out all right?”
“No, no! It was only idle curiosity. He doesn’t know me anyway and never
will.”
“Well, good night. And watch the ice in the yard. Mare broke a leg there
Thursday. Dam’ nice mare, too. Had to be shot. Got twelve dollars for
her hide. Good night.”
Madelaine went out again to Main Street. She strolled about for a time
in thought. Her walk brought her in front of the Court House. Nathaniel
Forge, the man who had written the little poem that had meant much in
her life, was down in a basement cell at that moment—two hundred feet
away—ten thousand miles.
She entered the hotel and found she still had no appetite for supper.
She asked what time she could catch a train back to the Junction.
“Find yer man?” demanded Pat Whitney.
“Oh, yes,” Madelaine answered cheerily enough. “The person I hoped to
find isn’t here any longer.”
VI
Twenty-four hours later she stood in her apartment and took down the
copper frame from the wall.
“Married!—A wife and little girl!—_In jail!_ And all the time I might
have asked Bernice! Oh, well!”
She laughed and called herself a silly fool. She ripped off the
backboard of the copper frame and extracted the poem. She found a
photograph of her mother and cut it to fit. The frame restored, she
picked up the mapping with the slip of news-print pasted thereon. She
started to tear it. She did tear it once across. She had started another
tear when she stopped. She smoothed the torn pieces out. She found an
envelope that would hold them and tucked it away in a bottom drawer.
“Oh, why did I go?” she cried, as she turned once again to her work. “I
shot my Bird of Paradise!”
She fell to thinking,—dry-throated, hard-eyed. So Gordon Ruggles wanted
to marry her, did he? The rotter!
Romance! What was Romance?
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