GROPING TERRIBLY
I
Into the town lock-up came Caleb Gridley. And Caleb Gridley was one mad
man.
It was four-thirty of a gray afternoon in March. The local police force
tilted back in its chair with its feet on its desk and perused the day’s
issue of the _Telegraph_ with the official corncob of the department
exquisitely odoriferous and the atmosphere of headquarters suggesting
gas masks, cheese knives and quickly lowered windows.
“So this is how you earn taxpayers’ money!” snarled the tanner. “Where’s
young Forge?”
The police force lowered its paper and blinked at old Caleb in
stupefaction. The last known address of the tanner had been Los Angeles.
“Where’d you come from now?” it demanded weakly.
“None o’ your damn business where I come from now. What’s the idea o’
jailin’ an innocent youngster like Natie Forge for his old man’s
cussedness? That’s what I wanner know and I’m gonna find out. Somebody’s
goin’ to answer for this—and they’re goin’ to answer to me!”
The police force gradually recovered from this astonishing levitation of
the Gridley corpus across three thousand continental miles. It became
human and a servant of the public, meaning Caleb.
“You needn’t blame me. I ain’t got nothin’ against him. All I do is
carry out the law.”
“Well, carry it out now and never bring it back. Where’s the boy? Got
him here?”
“Sure I got him here. Wanner see him?”
“What the devil do you think I’m here for—to gaze at your homely mug,
maybe?”
Gridley followed the police force out into the rear corridor and down
the twin rows of steel cages until they reached the last on the left. A
drawn-faced figure looked up anxiously.
“Got visitors, Nat,” announced the department. “Friend o’ yours!
Gridley!”
Caleb walked into the cell—as big-bodied, small-headed, beefy-jawed as
ever—derby on the back of his head, big hands in trousers pockets, fully
prepared to make hamburg of the entire penal system of the State of
Vermont.
“Well, bub,” roared the tanner, “what sort o’ fumi-diddles is this,
anyhow?”
“Mr. Gridley!” gasped the young prisoner. Then repeating the
department’s question: “Where’d you come from now?”
“California! Got a wire from your old-maid schoolteacher—the Hastings
female—one that learned you poetry writin’, remember? Come east to see
what kind o’ horseplay they’re puttin’ over on you, anyhow.” To the
department: “Mike, you get air in the space you’re now occupyin’! Me’n
Nat may wanner discuss poetry. And poetry’s somethin’ just natcherly
outter your class.”
The boy rose unsteadily. Inability to exercise had left his muscles
flaccid.
The tanner was a trifle shocked by the changed appearance of the young
man’s face. Every spare ounce of flesh had disappeared. The skin was
drawn tightly over the bones. Every turn of the jaw and depression of
the cheek was sharply defined. Yet for all its leanness, it was the
countenance of a young man grimly determined to find himself; not to
give way to weakness and self-pity. It was growing into a strong face.
The lips came together with exquisite precision. The muscles on each
side the mouth were cable-heavy. Only the eyes showed his true state of
mind. They were hollow and hounded.
“You came—from California—to help _me_?” The boy put out a hand.
Suddenly Caleb opened his gorilla arms. They encircled the lean young
torso, pulled Nathan tightly to the tobacco-daubed vest. Those huge arms
squeezed half the life out of him and then began belaboring him crazily
on the back.
“Ain’t got no license to go hoofin’ all over the dam’ planet when I
might better be seein’ to things right here in Paris! Bub! Bub! They
been takin’ pounds o’ flesh away from your heart. I can see it in them
eyes!”
“You heard how I landed here?” the boy asked gravely, evenly, a moment
later, when Caleb had released him. Caleb had to release him, else Nat
could not have said it.
Caleb did something to his nose with a handkerchief. The noise of it
suggested he would blast Nat from his confinement with one terrific
explosion.
“Yeah! Fodder told me, comin’ up on the ’bus. But to hell with how you
got here! Point is, how we goin’ to get you out.”
“Judge Wright set my bail at ten thousand dollars. My old chum Bill did
everything short of hocking his interest in the _Telegraph_, trying to
raise it. Seventy-five hundred in cash-money was the best he could do.
So I’ve just had to wait here—and wait and wait and wait. It’s been
horrible. For the first time in my life I’ve found out how long an hour
can be—or a day—or a week. That terrible helpless feeling—being shut up
like an animal in a cage, powerless. It’s done for me.”
“Naw it ain’t done for you! You’re good as you ever was, and a darn
sight better. But that’s neither here nor there—as the feller says when
he was chasin’ the hen. Point is, you gotta get out where you can do
some fightin’. How much’d she bust for? The box-shop?”
“Counting liabilities to stockholders, twenty-two thousand.”
“How much is the bank in for?”
“About twelve.”
“How much’d your old man swipe?”
“Close to ten.”
“B’damn, we’ll fix this lock-up business, quick enough! But why the
devil didn’t your Ma come forward with her house?”
“She said it was all she had to show for a life of hard work. She was
afraid of losing it,” responded Nathan humorously.
“But it was only leavin’ it as bail.”
“I know. She doesn’t understand.”
“Does she think more o’ that damn property than she does of her boy?”
“Apparently! No, that’s unfair. She thinks I should be punished a while
for keeping on with father. She wanted me to oust him a long time ago.
But I couldn’t, even if I’d wanted. He had control of the stock. I can’t
blame her. It’s hard to blame people who haven’t the capacity to
understand.”
“Trouble with you, young feller, you’re too soft-hearted for your own
good. You need to cultivate a little healthy selfishness. Never mind!
Maybe if you was selfish so, I wouldn’t love your dratted young hide
like I do—always goin’ and landin’ in scrapes. Well, just thought I’d
call in on my way to give Hentley hell, and tell you I was here on the
job. You wait a few minutes till I’ve fixed this bail stuff. Then we’ll
go out somewheres and assault food and talk it over. Down to the
box-shop, maybe, and have a look-see round.”
“We can’t go down there. The shop’s in charge of the sheriff. They won’t
let us in.”
“Won’t they, though? I’d like to see the goofus-brained pie-eater in
this tank-town as would stop me. I’d pull out his nose a coupla feet and
tie a knot in it!”
II
It was after ten o’clock when Nathan reached his home. He had eaten with
Caleb and then gone to the box-shop. Milly did not know of her husband’s
freedom until he admitted himself into their cold front hall and opened
the sitting-room door beyond.
“You!” she cried, springing up. “Have you broke jail, or—what?”
“Caleb Gridley came back from California this afternoon. He bailed me.
You needn’t worry, Milly. It’s coming out all right.”
“You mean the shop’s goin’ to start again?”
“It’s too badly smashed for that. But they won’t blame me—I mean to hold
me responsible for anything that father——”
“But the disgrace! Oh, my Gawd! Think o’ what this means to me!” The
wife turned angrily. “And little Mary!” she snapped over her shoulder.
“I couldn’t help it, Milly. I didn’t know dad was going to loot the
business.”
“Seems to me you oughta been smart enough to stop it—somehow. I used to
think you was awful smart, once. But you certainly fooled me, Nat. You
fooled me good.”
“Thanks!”
“Don’t give me none o’ your cheap lip!”
Nathan stood with hands clasped behind, face sadly downcast, looking at
his wife’s back.
Milly was stouter than when she had worked in the box-shop. She had also
coarsened. Her washed-out hair was gathered in a hasty knot at the back
of her neck. “Scolding locks” stuck out at wild angles. The back of that
neck was flat and homely. She wore a gingham house dress that was torn
in the front and she could have materially improved her appearance by
discarding her apron.
“Well,” she demanded, without looking around, “if the shop ain’t going
to start up, what you aimin’ to do?”
“I haven’t thought that far yet. Get a job, probably. Go to work!”
“S’pose old Gridley would set you up in somethin’?”
“I wouldn’t ask him, even if he would.”
“But what about me, I say? What about Mary?”
“You won’t starve. I’ll see to that.”
“You’ll see to that! Huh! You couldn’t even see yourself out of jail!
Gridley had to come clean from California and see it for you!”
“Milly, don’t let’s have any argument to-night. Please! I’m nearly all
in.”
“So am I all in! You never give a thought about me!”
“Is there anything to eat in the house?” was Nat’s way of turning the
edge of the altercation.
Milly shrugged her shoulders. Nathan went out into the cluttered,
odorous kitchen and hunted around for food.
He found a stale frankfurter and a piece of soggy pie. He drew a glass
of cold water and sat down to satisfy his hunger with the indigestible
mess.
“Mary cut her finger this afternoon,” announced the wife. “I had to get
Doc Johnson to see to it.” Milly, it had developed, was one of those
persons who summon a doctor for every indisposition known to medicine
from plain old-fashioned stomachache to falling off the roof and
breaking a neck.
“I’ve got something else to think about now, Milly, besides Mary cutting
her finger.”
“Yeah! I s’pose you have. You’re just like your father. A devil of a lot
you care about your women folks!” Milly rammed the fire angrily and
poked most of the live coals through into the ash-pan. “The fire’s out!”
she snapped. “And there ain’t any wood.”
“But I gave you money to buy wood only last Friday.”
“Dad’s out o’ work. Nellie’d have to give up her pianner lessons if Ma
didn’t have money from somewheres till dad’s took on again. I loaned it
to her. Blood’s a little thicker in our family than it is in yours, Nat
Forge!”
The food Nat had eaten failed to digest. He was tired and distraught and
broken. But he kept his temper.
“Let’s go to bed and talk it over in the morning,” he begged. “I told
you I’m nearly all in. Can’t you see it?”
“No, sir! You don’t go to bed, Nat Forge! Not till you’ve made this fire
outta somethin’. You don’t catch me crawlin’ out into a cold house when
Mary wakes up in the mornin’ and buildin’ no fire like your mother used
ter. Not while you lie abed and enjoy yourself. Besides, it’s so cold
to-night the pipes’ll freeze. Go down and smash up the piano box, if you
can’t find anything else.”
Nathan lighted a lantern, went into the cellar and found kindling. When
he had the fire negotiated, Milly was in bed with the little daughter,—a
small bed in the side room.
Nathan had to go into another bedroom, where the hoarfrost was furry on
the glass, and crawl between icy sheets alone.
He thought of many things that night, for sleep refused to come. Most of
all he thought of Carol. He wondered what had become of her, where she
was living and if she was happy. Then his thoughts turned to his father,
and he wondered how easily Johnathan was resting that night, with his
theft on his soul and the desertion of his family on his spirit. He
thought of his mother up in the big ark on Vermont Avenue, crazed by the
possibility that the court might wrest away her property by that iron
process known as The Law. He thought of his sister, married to a French
laborer, with a baby coming, up in Canada. He thought of Bernie Gridley
and her father’s report of her satisfactory marriage to a Chicago
millionaire. He thought, step by step, back to his boyhood and his days
with me in Foxboro—happy, care-free days.
“Oh, God,” he whispered in the dark. “Why do things happen so? Where’s
the reason behind it all—for there must be a reason? Do events and
experiences come hit-or-miss—by chance—in this world? It can’t be!”
Nathan asked himself if he were doing right, living thus with Milly when
he seemed to have nothing in common with her but their child,—when he
did not love her? Marriage? What was marriage? Did it mean merely living
in the same house with a woman, eating at the same table, sharing the
same bed? Or did marriage mean something finer and higher and better
than that, something which he had missed? Something which his father had
caused him to miss. What was that Something? Where should he go to look
for it? What must he do? He had to confess he did not know. He had no
standards by which to judge, no training to help him. Even Caleb Gridley
could not help him there. He remembered that Caleb had seemed vaguely
relieved when the Duchess had passed on.
Out of the ruck of all the fellow’s bittersweet memories, his present
perplexities, the foggy blur of the future, one fact stood preeminent,
however.
He must go on. Somehow he must go on. Perhaps time would solve the
problem, supply the great answer. But——
He must go on.
III
The night Fred Babcock married them, there had been no place for Nathan
to take his bride but the local hotel. He would not take her to his
father’s home; he did not care to go to Milly’s. They had separated for
an hour, each going for their “things”, pitifully meeting at the Whitney
House later to set sail on the tempestuous seas of mismated
connubiality.
Nathan had found his father pacing the same room, wild-eyed, wild-faced,
wild-haired, hands thrust deep in trousers pockets. The room was in
wreckage. His mother was in an adjacent apartment, eternally rocking,
rocking, rocking, considering her troubles in the dark. Father and
mother quickly forgot their differences, however, when they beheld
Nathan coming down the front stairs, suitcase in either hand.
“Where you going?” demanded Johnathan sharply.
“To the hotel.”
“You’re going nowhere of the sort. Put those valises back upstairs. No
story’ll go ’round this town if I can help it, that the very night my
son turned twenty-one, he packed his traps and scooted.”
“Do you think I’m going to bring a wife into this?”
“Bring a what?”
“A wife!”
“Wait till you’ve got a wife before you talk about bringing her into
anything. Put those suitcases back upstairs!”
“But I’ve got a wife. I married one at nine o’clock.”
In the darkened room Mrs. Forge’s rocker went over with a bump, she
sprang from it so quickly. Johnathan reached out a hand and clutched the
banisters.
“You married one at nine o’clock? Who have you married?”
“Mildred Richards. Good night!”
Nathan left his apoplectic parents standing side by side.
“_Oh, my God!_” groaned Johnathan. He staggered to the stairs and sat
down flaccid, his face buried in his hands. He remained that way for
half an hour.
Mrs. Forge walked slowly back into the wrecked dining room. She stood
looking out one of the windows, with clenched fists pushed against her
hips, face twitching, biting one corner of her upper lip so nervously it
was difficult to discern which was twitch and which was bite.
After that first tragic half-hour, Mrs. Forge’s thinking amounted to
this: Nathan had packed his clothes and gone to a wife and those clothes
were not in a very happy state of laundering. She had put off her wash
that week until she could get a new wringer. She still did her own
washing. Laundries mangled clothes so.
It would be hectic to follow on into the week, the month, the year which
followed, in so far as Nat’s marriage affected his father. A competent
psychologist might have explained Johnathan, but explaining him would
have availed Nathan little nor lightened his load. Johnathan’s ultimate
attitude was:
He had preserved stainless the morals and directed successfully, though
thanklessly, the spiritual education of his son for twenty-one wasted
years. The lad had turned out incorrigible. That did not alter the fact
that Johnathan had done his duty. His conscience was now clear. He had
discharged his obligations to God and State. He was a free man.
The attainment of his majority and the acquisition of a “helpmeet” left
Nathan to be treated as a man. And the chief incident in that treatment
was a deliberate campaign soon started for a show-down to determine who
was to be manager of that box-shop.
The effect on the business did not seem to occur to Johnathan. Or if he
thought about it, he told himself the business was so large he could
afford to lose occasionally for the sake of winning a principle.
Not once did the man realize or admit the rights of stockholders, or
consider them on a par with himself in the matter of ownership.
Stockholders were but a step raised above “help.” They had merely been
privileged to share in a small portion of the company’s annual profits.
Fiddlesticks with stockholders!
Nathan had kept the firm “right side up” and always progressing in the
right direction. Johnathan had thereby gained the idea that
businesses—at least manufacturing businesses—once established, ran
themselves. By sheer force of organization! He now set out deliberately
and maliciously to checkmate his son and retard him in every way he
could conceive. The business was a bit beyond Johnathan’s grasp. So he
decided upon a policy of “retrenchment.”
“Retrenchment” became his slogan and the motto on his ensign. Refusing
to order necessary office and factory supplies was “retrenchment.”
Turning down requests for quotations on new business on the ground that
the company already had business enough was “retrenchment.” “Docking” a
little flaxen-haired stenographer a half-day’s wages when she went home
ill at three in the afternoon was “retrenchment.” Anything and
everything that could discount Nathan, discredit his administration, get
the employees dissatisfied with the boy’s management, curtail production
so to show a loss which could be triumphantly charged to Nathan—all this
was “retrenchment”—most commendable “retrenchment.” Nathan grew to abhor
the word.
At such times as the father succeeded in his policy and the boy was
humiliated and stopped, Johnathan waved his hand grandly and said: “You
see! Some day you will grasp that your father is older and therefore
must know better!” To beat Nathan and get his word doubted or his
ability discounted among employees or stockholders pleased Johnathan
more than declaring a twelve per cent dividend.
Nathan had flouted his father, deliberately plunged into matrimony in
spite of all his father’s threats and admonitions. He had made his bed.
Now let him lie in it. But in addition, Johnathan, as the mocked parent,
intended to see that the bed was as hard, knotty and acanaceous as the
father knew how to make it.
If Nathan didn’t like all this, let him quit. He, Johnathan, had managed
to exist a considerable time before Nathan came into it; he guessed he
could take care of himself and his business “for a while yet.”
But Nathan had made a discovery which comes ultimately to many
organizers and builders,—that there is a point where the human creator
may become slave to the thing created.
It was easy enough for people to declare wrathfully that Nathan should
leave the box-shop and strike out for himself to teach John a lesson.
They did their thinking superficially. Nathan had built that business
under old Caleb’s coaching. He had a thousand details at his finger
tips. Large numbers of humble folk had invested in the company’s stock,
and there were the bank loans. The boy knew his father could not run the
plant, that chaos and failure would follow swift and sure upon his
retirement. And because of this knowledge, practical experience and
large bump of moral responsibility, the boy believed he had obligations
which he could not entirely sacrifice to self-interest. The business
owned him. He must go on, not because of his father, but in spite of
him. Perhaps Johnathan might be persuaded to drop out or dispose of his
stock. Better still, he might die. Or the bankers and stockholders might
some day learn the truth in a way that would not jeopardize the
business. In that event, merit and loyalty must be rewarded. But nothing
of the sort happened.
Johnathan had controlling stock in the company, and he saw to it that he
kept controlling stock in the company. He would no more have considered
making Nat a present of a block than he would have considered making the
boy a present of his severed hand. He had worked hard for all he
possessed, Johnathan had. His father had never helped him. Besides,
Nathan had proven himself incorrigible. He had married against his
father’s wishes. Therefore let him suffer the full penalty,—or get out
and hustle and cultivate the acquisitive faculty for himself.
Anyhow, Nathan received no stock and he continued in the large capacity
of General Superintendent. The most he could screw from the business was
thirty dollars a week, and Johnathan constantly reminded him that this
was far more than any boy of twenty-two had any title or right to
expect. At twenty-two, he, Johnathan, had drawn only eight dollars a
week; why on earth should Nathan receive more? Because he was married,
with an establishment of his own? What a reason! Johnathan had wasted
the best years of his life thwarting Nathan’s propensity toward just
that dilemma. Why recognize and regard incorrigibility by turning over
profits to a young upstart, even in the form of salary? Beside, he was
committed to a policy of vigorous “retrenchment.”
This situation at the shop was something Mildred could never understand.
She and her family had assumed that marrying Nathan meant marrying
Millions. Both had believed that with the Monday following the nuptials,
it was to be Milly’s delirious destiny to dip her red, paste-bedaubed
fingers into the Forges’ golden pile and exist forever after in castles
in Spain. The realization that she must keep her domestic budget inside
of thirty weekly dollars came as a blunt shock. “Why, that’s only ten
dollars more than father makes; it’s just like Ma’s had to do all her
life!” cried the angry, astounded girl. Nevertheless, it was the truth,
the brutal truth. And early she made Nathan feel that he had buncoed
her.
Nathan’s subsequent estimate of Milly was no more satisfying. He had met
her at the hotel that first night, convinced Pat Whitney they were
properly married and been given one of the lower front rooms. It was
Milly’s first contact with a real bathroom, and “a regular tub” as she
expressed it. In fact, the whole experience for a time was not unlike a
glorious entrance into marble halls of which all heroines daydreamed in
the Elsie books. The two features of their apartment which most
interested and impressed her were the globular receptacle on the
washstand which, being inverted, spilled liquid soap, and the hemp rope
with handles on it coiled on a hook beside a window for use in case of
fire. She rather hoped there would be a fire. It might be interesting,
going down that rope. Milly had heard that vaguely mystic phrase, “Hotel
life.” She decided she liked “hotel life.” Everything was so convenient
and “classy” and modern.
Nathan’s first disillusion came when the girl started boldly to disrobe
and toss her clothing about on the chairs and the status of her
undergarments was disclosed. There were many disillusions that night and
the day and week ensuing. Milly had never before seen pyjamas at close
range. “Gawd, Ma,” she confided awesomely next day, “he goes to sleep in
white pants! You oughta see ’em!”
Nathan awoke first, the following morning,—that cold, much celebrated
dawn commencing the “day afterward.” He looked upon the features of his
still-sleeping wife as a man coming from _metempsychosis_. She wore a
heavy flannel nightgown which had once been pink, buttoned to her throat
with Chinese chastity. Her marcelled pompadour was shoved over one ear.
Her mouth was open and several teeth needed immediate dental attention.
A shudder ran through the boy. He was in bed with an utter stranger,
with whom he had nothing in common,—a female of whom he knew little
excepting that she had always lived on the edge of the “flats” with
multitudinous brothers and sisters, and that her father skinned cows.
And he had promised to love, honor and cherish her until death! He
suddenly wanted to flee Milly, his parents, the business, Paris,
everything,—in a panic.
Yet he could have forgiven his new wife many deficiencies, perhaps, if
she had supplied that thing he had most expected: Sanctuary in her arms.
Milly had supplied no sanctuary in her arms. If Milly had arms, they
were far from the purpose of solacing distraught masculinity. Milly’s
arms were very necessary connections between her paste-bedaubed hands
and her ample shoulders. Nothing more. What else did he expect them to
be?
Nathan was shocked. She was a Woman, wasn’t she? He had made her his
wife. She had said that she loved him and asked him if there were
anything she could do to make him happy. What, then, was wrong?
A small-town Pygmalion waited for the conjugal Galatea he had created to
be struck with divine fire and return his embrace gloriously. But divine
fires, alas, rarely impregnate dough pans.
Nathan had made the sickening mistake that millions of poor youngsters
make piteously every day,—that keeps divorce mills grinding to the
horror of sanctimonious religionists: He had mistaken Sex for Ladyhood.
Instead of Milly inviting Nathan into Carmel, it was the man who
descended to the girl as though she were a coarse-grained child.
Milly in propinquity with her suddenly acquired husband was the
charwoman who had found a wounded demigod by the wayside and did not
know what to do with him, nor exactly how to treat him, after his
bruised hulk—Olympus ostracized—was hers for the taking.
Nathan and Milly, however, were married. In _metempsychosis_ or no, the
lad had assumed obligations he felt he could not retract. A home might
solve the problem. So Nathan set about acquiring a home. With an eye to
the limitations of thirty dollars, he rented the Mills cottage on Pine
Street,—a six-room structure of poor sanitary equipment and no furnace.
His first purchases were two stoves,—one set up in the kitchen, the
other in the “sitting room.” Milly, her first shock of disillusion over,
proceeded to make the best of a bad bargain.
IV
It quickly developed that she had a passion for soap clubs and a
dangerous propensity toward buying from agents. The former was the more
harmless for some deliberation was usually given to premiums. But those
agents!
Milly bought a twelve-volume set of encyclopedias “on time” before she
and Nathan had found a bedroom carpet. She bought several “shrieking”
rugs from Armenian peddlers and a banquet lamp in anticipation of
domestic equipment to be requisite when the Forges had attained to
banquets. She was imposed upon for patent mops and cheated on carpet
beaters. She laid in enough stove polish to shine all the baseburners in
Paris County. Nathan came home one night and found himself in debt for
an upright piano, twenty dollars down and five dollars a month until
death. Milly thought it was “just simply grand” and contracted to begin
music lessons before she had sheets enough for her beds.
But her wildest orgies were carried on in the depths of the local “five
and ten.”
Milly swore by F. W. Woolworth as by a savior. Nathan gave her fifty
dollars to temporarily furnish her pantry, more money than she had ever
held in her hands at one time in all her past life. Twenty-five dollars
she “slipped” to her mother to get all her younger brothers and sisters
some shoes. With the other half she “descended” on the five-and-ten.
She bought all her dishes and pantry ware from the five-and-ten. She
bought ribbons, pictures and three cardboard wastebaskets. She bought
flour sifters that wouldn’t sift and tack pullers that wouldn’t pull.
She procured a huge cambric bag and came home each night, straining
beneath it or with a young brother pulling it on his sled. Saturday
afternoon she had twenty-five cents remaining. She hunted the
five-and-ten anxiously for five articles of a nickel apiece which “might
come in handy around the house.” Her last purchase was a half-dozen lead
pencils. They slipped from her moth-eaten muff before she reached her
gate however.
The Forge home became a jumble of nothing in particular but in character
somewhat weird. A mahogany rocker, a mission center table, a golden-oak
what-not (secondhand) and a gilt corner chair were exhibits A, B, C and
D in the front room. The walls of the house not hung with small ten-cent
pictures were spattered with colored postcards on big pins,—from Savin
Rock or Nantasket Beach. The chaotic total of all this shabby gentility
shocked Nathan when he beheld it. He decided it was a lack of money. He
didn’t possess enough to furnish a home like the Seavers of previous
mention. But he did make a start the first Christmas by surprising Milly
with a quartered-oak Victrola to harmonize with the mission center
table, the idea being to unify eventually the scheme of the room as more
bizarre effects could be culled out. But three things happened to the
Victrola with lamentable swiftness. First, Milly decided it wasn’t the
center table she wanted the Victrola to match; it was the installment
piano. So without consulting Nathan she went as usual to the
“five-and-ten” and bought a half-dozen cans of “paint” whose outer
labels bore some resemblance to the color of the piano. The effect on
the beautiful, dull, mission finish was not at all what Milly had
anticipated; in fact, the Victrola looked as though it had weathered a
bad attack of cherry measles. The painting was still a _casus belli_ in
the Forge “parlor” when Jake Richards’ youngest child pulled out most of
the records one Sunday afternoon and broke them; they “cracked with such
a nice noise!” Lastly, young Tommy Richards decided during an
after-school visit to his sister that something ailed the “works” of the
Victrola and they emphatically needed fixing. So he dug out an alarming
array of “five-and-ten” tools, everything in fact but an ax, and
proceeded to “fix” them. The novelty of it palled on him after he had
pinched a finger, and he deserted the science of melodious mechanics
entirely when he unscrewed a mysterious metal compartment and the
mainspring exploded in his face. Mechanically speaking, he got beyond
his depth. He discreetly vanished and the Victrola sang not again.
Nathan’s first quarrel of note with Milly resulted from the
appropriation of the married sister’s home by the Richards tribe as an
extension of their own. My friend made the additional discovery common
to many men who have wedded Sex instead of Ladyhood, that he had also
married the girl’s family. As soon as Milly had sorted out her Woolworth
dishes and run up a thirty-dollar bill at the Red Front Grocery, she
affected to demonstrate her housewifery by inviting all of that family
to dinner,—Sunday dinner. And her family came. Great was the coming
thereof.
Nathan held a dim idea there had been various brothers and sisters in
the Richards house across the “flats.” But that first Sunday dinner was
a revelation—likewise the alarming quantities of food it required to
satiate them. The Forge larder reasonably resembled “a land overflowing
with milk and honey” before they came. After they had gone, that
thirty-dollar commissary had been attacked as by a plague of Egyptian
locusts. Nathan, however, had not begrudged the food. What bothered him
most was their methods of assimilation. There had been little or no
table etiquette at Johnathan’s house. But such as it had been, it was
courtly beside the demonstration in “manners”, or lack of them, revealed
at that first Sunday dinner as well as in many hectic repetitions.
When the Richards tribe recovered from their awe of Nathan, discovered
him quite a mortal being with two arms, two legs and a propensity to
consume food at conventional intervals like themselves, they “pitched
in.” The younger children squalled and fought over smaller delicacies.
Two of them enjoyed a pleasing altercation with pieces of baked potato.
Mother Richards held the baby against a moist breast and allowed the
little barbarian to pull a plate of soft squash pie into her lap. This
was lamentable but cute. Undoubtedly Nathan had pulled a plate of soft
squash pie into his mother’s lap at “thirteen months.”
Nathan took issuance with old Jake one Sunday, however, for producing a
flat, brown hip-flask and using copious draughts therefrom to “give him
an appetite.” Thereafter old Jake “made his vittles set right” with
more. The lad, sick of the whole Richards tribe, at the frayed end of
his patience generally, advised old Jake in hot phrases to work up his
appetites and make his vittles set right with alcohol elsewhere,—never
to repeat the disgusting performance in his home again. A dour time
followed. Old Jake had imbibed enough to be quarrelsome. Milly took her
father’s part. She called Nathan a hypocrite because “he couldn’t stand
the sight of a little hooch.” It was her house as well as Nathan’s and
if Nathan didn’t like it, she guessed she knew what he could do. Which
Nathan did. He grabbed old Jake by turkey neck and trouser seat and
threw him out into the mud. Old Jake’s flask and hat followed. So did
the Richards tribe, though they went voluntarily and sidestepped the
mud. They swore they had been insulted; they would never set foot in
Nathan’s house again. But a month later they were back; old Jake had
apologized, he had said “blood was thicker than water” and it didn’t pay
to hold grudges. And they descended on the large assortment of table
delicacies purchased the previous evening at the Élite Bakery and ate
until the boy wondered if sheer hunger hadn’t driven them back. He
thought they must conserve their appetites during the week to distend
their stomachs on Sunday noon at his expense.
The same superficial logicians who would acclaim Nat a weakling for not
leaving his father to learn his lesson at the box-shop would undoubtedly
have the boy kick his way out of the domestic slough in which he had
slipped now, get divorced and make a fresh start elsewhere. Very good
indeed for those able to see the situation in perspective or whose
enlightenment permits them so to decide the matter for their own
gratification. Nathan could not see the situation in any perspective; he
had little training and less enlightenment to help him decide any
matter; he only knew that in his heart was a blind, piteous groping for
something higher and better, knew instinctively that this sort of thing
was not for him and that he had blundered, blundered horribly. But how
to correct that blunder was quite another question.
There was a baby coming!
The lad couldn’t bring himself to cast aside or leave a woman “in
Milly’s condition” as Mother Richards sighed over it. One narrow
mistake, made far back the day Mrs. Forge had whirled on her small son
and scared him so badly anent sex, had been followed by another and
another. As he grew older, blunder after blunder had rolled up, like a
ball of soft snow juggernauting down hill. Now he was about to become a
father, temperamentally a pathetic mixture of half man, half boy
himself. No, he could see no self-justification in separating from
Milly. Not then. And things went from bad to worse.
The baby was born and any neatness and housewifery which Milly may have
shown before its arrival were quickly dispensed with, “caring for baby.”
Milly apparently spent whole days and weeks “caring for baby.” Her
floors went unswept and her dishes went unwashed. Nathan subsisted on
various sticky pastries procured from the Élite Bakery. With increasing
frequence he was advised frankly to “go up town and get his supper”
because “care of baby” had so preoccupied the shining hours that Milly
hadn’t even had time to do up her hair. Which was self-evident. If she
“did up her hair” twice a week, she performed the extraordinary. She
“twisted it up for comfort” in the morning and it was still twisted up
for comfort when she retired at night. And Milly was always overworked,
frightfully overworked. She said so. Nathan had to listen. All this,
while Johnathan was doing his utmost at the factory to show his son that
he was wrong in everything on general principle and all the trouble
between father and son was Nat’s conceit, incorrigibility and inherent
animosity against “retrenchment.”
Nathan had heard somewhere about the queer, constricted twinge which
comes to a father who feels the tiny fingers of his first-born grip his
own. Nathan felt no such twinge. The baby was born at the Richards’ home
across the “flats.” Nathan had wished his wife to go to the local
hospital but Milly was shy of hospitals. She called them “butcher
shops.” Nathan ate his meals at the Élite the week preceding the great
event and slept in an unmade bed in a slovenly house. Then one
mid-afternoon young Tom burst into the box-shop office. Excitedly he
accosted Nathan.
“Hey!” he yelled. “Yer kid’s come! An’ I lost my bet with Mickey
Sweeney. I said it was gonna be a boy and the darn thing’s cost me
thirty cents!”
Nathan went at once to the “house across the flats.” The baby was much
in evidence, or its lungs were. Nathan thought it sounded like the
Victrola when the needle ran off and played one horrible sound over and
over.
The child looked like a worm and was hideously homely. Mrs. Richards
refused to let him take it. He could see Milly “sometime to-morrow.”
He went back to the shop. Six men had “walked out cold” because
Johnathan had seized upon his enforced absence to insist they load a
freight car his way and in the defiance of a method Nathan and the men
had spent months in perfecting.
“Huh! Father, are you?” sniffed Johnathan. “And the milk isn’t wiped off
your own chin yet. A father! Fiddlesticks!”
Five years of this, incredible as it may seem, and now the box-shop had
gone the way of all flesh.
Nathan slept in the dark, old Caleb and myself the only sincere friends
he had on earth.
Oh, Mediocrity! What crimes against youth may be committed in thy name!
V
The evening following Nathan’s release from custody, my mother met me as
I entered our home, the hour about seven-thirty.
“Nathan’s ill,” she declared. “I met the Doctor’s wife at the missionary
meeting this afternoon and she told me. He ate something last night that
disagreed with him and had a bad case of acute indigestion along toward
morning. But the Doctor says what really ails Nat is a general nervous
breakdown and collapse. You’d better go over. If there’s anything I can
do, let me know. I’ll keep your supper in the fireless cooker.”
I went to the Pine Street cottage.
Milly had always distrusted me. She said Nathan “carried tales” to me
about herself and her folks. Therefore she was customarily surly when
she admitted me.
I found Nathan in a side room, the place warmed by a stinking oil
heater. He was lying on his stomach in a rumpled bed, his fevered face
buried in his arms. He turned over when I entered. He smiled grimly.
Milly stood at the door for an instant and then said—to Nathan:
“Guess you’ll live till I get back. I’m going down to mother’s. Ruth’s
having a party and——”
“Yeah!” shrieked little Mary, “and they’re gonna have ice cream!”
So Mildred and the child slammed out of the house. I scooped an armful
of miscellaneous clutter from a chair and swung it over to Nat’s
bedside. But first I lowered the window and changed the air.
“I’m glad you’ve come, Bill,” he said huskily. “If it wasn’t for you and
old Gridley, there’s times it seems I’d be almost ready to quit.”
“Buck up, old man,” I told him. “Nothing’s so bad that it can’t be
worse.”
“Yes, I know! And God Almighty hates a quitter! But I’m so muddled and
antagonized and shot to pieces physically that I’ve almost lost my grit
to go on. I’ve lost it, Billy, because somehow I can’t see much
incentive for going ahead.”
We talked then as men will talk. We were not choice as to metaphor or
idiom. We discussed The Sex with relieving frankness; we did not refer
to spades as long-handled agricultural implements used to turn over the
sod to find fishworms or for the digging of graves.
“Bill! Bill!” my friend cried feverishly. “Tell me what it’s all for!
Tell me why it’s happened to me like this! Tell me where I’ve erred!
Tell me how it’s all to end! What’s the constructive meaning in it all,
Bill,—and is there any constructive meaning?”
Tell him? How could I tell him? How could I make him see that his
present predicament was as simple a dénouement of causes set in motion
years back as it was natural for a field of waving corn to follow the
dropping of potent yellow kernels in the spring.
Married to a cheap woman who “guessed he wouldn’t die” before she
returned from a party where the chief item of interest was ice cream,
lying in a slovenly claptrap of a home, excoriated by thoughtless local
people, facing a court hearing and possible disgrace, laden with
domestic obligations from which there was no escape in honor, as a man
of his type conceives honor,—all harked back, I say, to the first day he
had sought enlightenment about sex from the place he should have sought
it, his mother, and been shocked instead into vicious repression. That
childish “shocking” was an epilogue of all the sordid method of training
him. For what? For exactly what Nathan was as he lay this night upon his
bed.
The intolerable vileness and injustice of the whole miserable business
lay in the fact that the father and mother responsible not only went
scot-free from the penalty son and daughter must pay, but saw absolutely
no blame for themselves in that dénouement. Blame for themselves? They
actually believed themselves wronged.
Nathan rolled feverishly on his rumpled bed.
“Bill,” he rambled on wistfully, “remember the walks and talks we had
when we were kids—the nights under the starlight—the boat rides down the
river when I looked into the future and the world seemed so beautiful
and wonderful, it hurt? I dreamed of a future then, Bill, in which I was
affluent and successful—a wonder-time when all my dreams were coming
true. And have a look, Bill! I’m loaded with the disgrace of the
box-shop failure and half the poor people in town, it seems, weeping
over their lost savings; married to a wife I don’t seem to get along
with—with a baby that isn’t being brought up at all the way I’d like to
see her brought up—paying the bills of a home where I can’t even get
food cooked to eat nor a bed made to sleep on—less than a hundred
dollars to my name——”
“I’ll loan you whatever money you need, Nat! How much——?”
“Oh, it isn’t that, Bill, it isn’t that! I dreamed of a wife who’d be a
mate and a pal, Bill; one who’d be in a woman all that mother and the
rest of the women I’ve known were not—who could work with me and play
with me and laugh with me and love with me—and—and—I’ve gone to work and
tied myself for life to a poor girl who writes her name like a
seven-year-old and doesn’t know whether Bacon was a poet or something
you buy for twelve cents a pound at the butcher’s and comes from a hog.
I dreamed of a home, Bill—fine and rare and restful and rich, where all
my treasures were to be gathered, where lights were seductive and every
hour a golden moment—what was that line I quoted to you once, Bill—about
‘art drawing-rooms softly shaded at midnight?’ And look what I’ve got!
Six rooms cluttered with junk, one step removed from squalor in a mud
hut! This is my life, Bill, and I’m only twenty-six! They say America
may get drawn into the war. Maybe—maybe—that’s going to be my way out.
Only somehow, going to war in that spirit and leaving a foul nest behind
seems weakness, Bill, not a whole lot different than putting the muzzle
of a shotgun into my mouth and pulling the trigger with my foot!”
As I remained silent, he went on:
“Bill, remember the day I told you something about life being a fog—in
which I groped blindly? Who’s responsible for that fog? Am I
responsible, Bill—because I can’t find any way out?”
“No!” I cried wrathfully. “Your folks are responsible! Damn them
bringing kids into the world and thinking they’ve done their whole duty
by simply giving them food for their bodies and clothes for their backs!
Damn the assumption that parents are under no obligation to supply as
much protection and training for a child’s mind and spirit as the law
demands shall be supplied to its body!”
“I’m groping, Bill! Groping, groping groping! Will I ever find my way
out? I wonder? It’s too late now to damn father and mother. Poor souls,
I’m just beginning to see now they didn’t know any better. And the
hopeless part of my predicament is that now I’m the father of a child in
turn—although somehow I can’t feel like a father!—and if I don’t play
out my hand, the day’s coming when my child is going to turn around and
execrate me as cordially as I feel like execrating my own folks
to-night!”
“The trouble with you is, Nat—you’re too darned conscientious for your
own good. You’ve got a great bump of moral responsibility and it fills
the whole of the inside of you. What you lack is a good healthy
selfishness that would make people—especially your own relatives—quit
playing you for a sucker!”
“Easy enough to say, Bill. That’s what Caleb Gridley contended. But if I
acquired such a selfishness, where would I start in to exercise it?
Father? He’s gone! Mother? Lord! She’d run shrieking through Main Street
and probably end up in an asylum. Besides, after all, she’s my mother!
Milly? I’ve married her and burdened her with a child. She’s no
different than she was when I married her. In so far as she’s been given
the light, or had the training in turn from her parents, she’s doing the
best she knows how. No, the trouble with me is, Bill, I’m cursed with
the type of mind that unconsciously turns back to causes for every
result. And when I analyze those causes, I can’t do anything that savors
of injustice. I don’t think I’m pitying myself when I say that I’ve
known so much injustice myself that I can’t find it in my heart to pass
more along to others. Folks who have suffered are quicker to detect
suffering, I suppose. They shrink from passing it along. I don’t know!
Somehow I’ve learned to judge folks, not by their conscious acts or the
results they get, so much as by their motives. But it’s got me in a
devil of a mess, Bill. And I’m a poor hater—a rotten poor hater. There’s
dad now, I don’t hate him half as much as I did a few years ago. I’m
beginning to pity him—for his narrowness and weakness and the things he
couldn’t understand.”
What can be done with a chap like that? I give it up. The predicament
simply had to work itself out.
“John and Anna Forge are only types of lots o’ parents, William,” said
Uncle Joe Fodder when I went to the old philosopher for counsel later
that week. “Not all of ’em are so narrow and vicious as John and Anna.
It isn’t always the girl question that gets ’em all het up so they raise
Cain with their kids. But most parents is nuts over somethin’, and their
kids has to take the backwash. And most growed folks don’t make
theirselves much trouble forgettin’ their own kidhood or how they felt
about life’s big problems while they too was growin’. But the worst sin
they’re guilty of, William, is bringing kids into the world, raisin’ ’em
to sixteen, eighteen or twenty-one, maybe—then turnin’ ’em loose to
shift for theirselves and lettin’ the devil take the hindmost. Among all
the animals, Man, the highest in development, is the only one that don’t
take much trouble to show their young how to hunt a livin’ or dodge
life’s traps. And more’s the pity! Why, even a woodchuck does better’n
that!”
“Oh, well, Nat,” I said, as I finally arose to leave that night, “if the
allotted span of human life is seventy years, as Holy Writ contends, and
you’re only twenty-six now, you’ve got forty-four years ahead of you
yet. And forty-four years can bring many changes, old man. Perhaps all
this is only education and training for something finer and grander and
sweeter than you’ve ever dreamed of yet. Only being down close to it and
going through it right now to-night it’s rather hard to see it.”
“You really think so, Bill?” Nathan asked almost piteously.
“Who knows, Nat?”
“I’ve been studying my Bible a bit, Bill. I’m not ashamed to admit it.
Not dad’s Bible—_the_ Bible. Men in perplexity have been going to the
Bible for a long, long time, Bill. And I’ve been doing a lot of thinking
about the words of the psalmist: ‘Whom the Lord loveth, He chasteneth.’
I’ve never forgotten how you and I prayed that poor little kid’s prayer
that night in the alders after I’d tried to kiss Bernie Gridley. I’ve
done a lot of praying, Bill—I mean to do more. I’ve wondered if it’s
true, ‘Whom the Lord loveth, He chasteneth?’ Is that the reason I must
grope for a time in a fog before finding a hill top where the sun’s
shining gloriously—and Someone—is waiting for me to come up? I wonder if
there is a God—if the world is anything but a little fleck of gravel,
twirling off in space—if the hairs of our heads are not numbered—if the
sparrows aren’t seen when they fall? I wonder, Bill, if the Almighty
perhaps—does—love—me? And—that’s—the reason?”
My throat grew thick at the way he said it. Nathan on the bed blurred
before me. There was nothing maudlin about it.
VI
Nathan was ill two weeks. The affairs of the box-shop were wound up.
Nathan was exonerated from any criminal complicity in his father’s
felony. The fiasco passed into small-town industrial history.
My friend secured a position in the sales department of the knitting
mills. A month later he started off on the road. His salary was two
thousand a year and a generous bonus in commissions. I think Caleb
Gridley was responsible.
VII
Milly considered herself left a widow without a widow’s privileges. One
night she met Si Plumb on the street and let him take her into the
Olympic picture show.
She knew people were commenting and was defiant.
The film was, “Her Right to Happiness.” There was a travelogue and a
current pictorial beforehand. However, the travelogue and current
pictorial didn’t count.
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