ALWAYS JUSTIFIED
I
The Grand Hotel in Yokohama, Japan, is built close to the edge of Tokio
Bay. Only the width of a macadam street separates it from a walled
embankment with a twenty-foot drop down to the harbor water. It is a
long, red building with a wide portico running the entire length of the
eastern side. Tourists from the seven corners of the earth sit before
the great, opened windows and gaze across the blue waters where outgoing
liners are heading for home.
In a wicker lounging chair before one of those great windows at twilight
of an August day in 1916 sat an oldish man with weak, watery eyes and a
petulant mouth. He was dressed in white pongee, somewhat rumpled, and in
his lap he toyed with a wide-brimmed Panama hat. His eyes were far away;
he too was thinking of those liners, outward bound, heading for home.
Home!
Johnathan Forge had never had a home. Or so he told himself. A house, a
wife, children, expense, all these, yes! But a home, never! It was his
wife’s fault. She had never been a home-maker from the beginning.
His thoughts turned backward this August afternoon back to America—New
England—Vermont! He wondered about the people he had known so long and
so intimately there. What had happened after he left them? How had they
fared? What were they doing—now—this afternoon—this moment?
Johnathan Forge believed that life had given him a scurvy deal.
His father had made him work from earliest boyhood and he had turned
over his wages to his parents until the day and the night he was
twenty-one. That following year he had married—married Anna Farman. She
had clerked in the same store where Johnathan had been a sort of
all-around handy man and shipping clerk. He had been very much in love
with her, or thought he was. Yet almost from the first night he had
discovered that between his mother and his wife a gulf existed as wide
as China. His father’s life had been happy because his mother was a
conscientious Christian woman. She knew how to keep her place.
His father had been absolute lord and Czar of the Forge family fortunes.
No one ever presumed to question that such was not his right. His mother
had never scoffed at St. Paul’s injunction anent wives submitting
themselves unto their husbands as unto the law of God. Mrs. Forge, his
mother, had taken note of St. Paul and rather approved of him, following
his domestic admonitions without question. The result had been peace and
happiness; at least there had never been any disgraceful quarreling or
contention between wife and husband in the home of his father. The
husband had laid down the law and the wife had obeyed. It was simple.
Was he not the husband and father? Why shouldn’t she obey? Happy? What
greater happiness could a woman desire than obeying her husband,
submitting to him as unto the law of God? At least, when women did that
sort of thing, domestic peace and connubial bliss resulted. Anna Farman
had not done that sort of thing and showed she had not the least intent
in the world of doing that sort of thing. She had married and then
promptly declared she intended to preserve her own individuality and do
as she pleased. It was plain therefore what chaos and misery ensued when
any one—especially woman—flouted the decrees of the Almighty, His seers,
His prophets and His saints.
Not only had Anna refused to obey her husband but she had early shown
herself extravagant and impractical. At first she had wanted shoes,
clothes, hats for every season of the year. Think of a woman with four
hats! Or four pairs of shoes! Why, his own mother had worn one hat three
years, done it cheerfully, thought nothing of it! Anna had quarreled
with Johnathan over the subject of clothing so bitterly that the young
husband might have left her the first year, if a baby had not been
coming. After that he was in for it. There was no hope, no escape. And
for twenty-five years he had endured it. Twenty-five years! A
quarter-century! To think of it! What a fool he had been! What a fool!
A year of foreign travel—illicit though it might have been considered in
certain obnoxious quarters—had changed Johnathan in many ways, however.
For one thing, it had radically revised his ideas about God. The myriad
millions of Asia, in their sordid, gnat-like existence, had caused him
to wonder just how “personal” God really was. Anyhow, his conscience was
clear about leaving home in so far as God was concerned.
In the first place, he had done his full duty by his children. He had
given them a home, food for their growing bodies, clothes for their
backs. He had made them attend divine services, he had kept their morals
clean and their minds pure. It had been an awful ordeal to keep Nathan
away from The Sex. Still he had managed it. That Nathan had promptly
married at twenty-one had nothing to do with Johnathan. Johnathan had
only been responsible for the boy until maturity. Not one moment after!
The boy had become a man then. He had passed out of the father’s
jurisdiction. If he had made a hard bed, let him lie in it, indeed. It
only went to show he should have taken his loving father’s counsel to
heart.
As for leaving his wife, they had nothing in common, with the children
married. Why, then, should they live together? Beside, had he not left
her in undisputed possession of a ten-thousand-dollar house? Let her
sell that house if she so desired and live on the money. Ten thousand
dollars should keep her the rest of her life. In fact, Johnathan
flattered himself he had done rather handsomely by his wife. No cause
for self-execration there! Then how about the box-shop? Ah, yes! The
box-shop!
Well, it was this way: In the beginning he had saved eighteen hundred
dollars of hard-earned money in spite of his wife’s spendthrift habits,
and bought the box-shop. He had obligated himself for thirty-two hundred
dollars more in notes. And, thank God, somehow he had paid them. But it
had been with his own money, before he turned the factory over to the
corporation and accepted stock.
He had been very clever in that transfer. He had taken thirteen thousand
dollars’ worth of stock for the five thousand equity he had originally
held in the business; well, it belonged to him. If he was cute on a
trade, it was the other fellow’s fault if the other fellow didn’t watch
out and found himself cheated. Then had come those hectic years when his
boy’s ramifications had “grayed his hair.”
Johnathan never thought of them but what he grew angry, even in his
exile. What he had suffered from that boy—his crazy ideas, his
impertinence—his insolence, his refusal to “go into conference” with his
father for the good of the business—his hot-headed, know-it-all,
don’t-give-a-damn attitude toward the one in all the world who had done
so much for him! How had the father ever “stuck them out”—those years?
But he had stuck them out. And he had only left the whole miserable mess
when it was self-evident that the unnatural son’s bigotry and business
inability were going to pile his beautiful business on the rocks at
last. That was only the first law of nature,—self-preservation. Even
rats desert a sinking ship, and how much more sensible and intelligent
should grown men show themselves than rats! Yet what had he taken from
that business that was not due him? That was not his own? He had sold
his five-thousand-dollar concern for thirteen thousand dollars. Very
good! All he had withdrawn at the last was ten thousand dollars. Not a
penny more; ten thousand dollars! Three thousand less than the value of
his stock. And to show he had no criminal intent, he had duly made out
and endorsed his certificates back to the company—back to the
corporation’s treasurer—and left them on Nathan’s desk for transfer.
Very good, then! He had simply decided he would rather have his money
than the stock and made the swap. Nothing crooked about that! If he had
carried away the certificates with him and the money—ah, then he would
be a criminal in sight of God and man. But he had simply been shrewd. If
his boy was so tarnation smart, let him sell the father’s stock to some
one about the village and use the money to reimburse the company for
what Johnathan had taken. That the “Board of Directors” had not
sanctioned such a purchase from the treasury was nothing to Johnathan.
Who were the “Board” but Nathan and Charley Newton and Peter Whipple of
the Process Works and one or two others? They never would have
understood Johnathan’s domestic position anyhow, or appreciated why he
should want to leave home forever. How could they know the indignities
and quarrels which had been his portion for twenty-five dreary years?
What was the mere technicality of recording such a transfer on the
books, anyway? If he had told them first, they would only have objected;
and he would have had to hold a meeting and use his stock-control to
club them into it. That would have aroused the banks and “pulled down
the temple,” making the stock worthless.
No, Johnathan had only exercised ordinary Yankee shrewdness. And yet——
The great, bothersome, indefatigable fact remained that the banks and
Paris investors would never see the deal in the light in which Johnathan
saw it himself. He could not go home!
Not that he wanted to go home, of course. But still, he could not go
home. And it bothered him.
Likewise there was the Carlysle woman. Great, fine, much-to-be-desired
romance had come into Johnathan’s life at last.
And if he married her, still more emphatically than ever he could not go
home. He would be guilty of bigamy, and the authorities in the
States—who could never appreciate what a hard time Johnathan had endured
through twenty-five hectic years—had very strict ideas about bigamy. And
some day Mrs. Johnathan Forge, _née_ Carlysle, might want to go home.
Then how could he explain? What could he do?
Johnathan sighed and sloughed down in his chair. After all these years,
happiness was within his grasp and he could not grasp it. The world was
very hard. Hard! Hard! Hard!
There were other crosses in it, after all, besides Nathan.
II
Nathan went up to the desk and the Yates Hotel in Syracuse and asked for
his key and his mail.
He received a postcard from Milly—asking him to send her money—a
telephone and a gas bill which had been forwarded for payment, a letter
from young Ted Thorne, his sales manager, and a long narrow envelope
with a queer stamp. Nathan was puzzled by that stamp. It was a ten-sen
stamp. What foreign country had sen among their coinage and who should
be writing him from one of them?
He slit the envelope at the cigar counter while the clerk waited for him
to select his smokes from a proffered handful. Then a queer, hard
surprise smote him as he read:
Yokohama, Japan,
August 2, 1916.
Nathaniel Forge, Paris, Vt., U. S. A.
Dear Sir:
I write to you from a foreign land, afar from home, and an exile
from all I hold most dear. My life almost wrecked by a brainless
woman and thankless, unnatural children, here I sit in the
forty-eighth year of my age, trying not to see the awful past,
only to pierce the unknown future, and give you one last chance
to redeem yourself and call down upon your head your father’s
blessing.
You are perfectly aware, Nathaniel, of what my domestic life
was, for twenty-five fearful years. You, grown now to man’s
estate, realize that your father showed the mettle and stamina
to endure blindly for conscience’ sake and from his sense of
great, grim duty. If your rattle-brained marriage has turned out
happily, you know what your devoted father missed. If it has
turned out unhappily (for which you have no one to blame but
yourself!) you are tasting the fruits of all the wormwood and
aloes that was my potion since the first day I looked upon your
baby face and hugged you to my bosom with a father’s pride.
In either case, you should be in a position to sympathize with
me and at last pay your great debt to me by exerting yourself
there at home in a trifling matter in my behalf.
Nathaniel, I may say I have broadened mentally in many things
since leaving Paris and altered my views on many matters,
principally the subject of divorce. Against my will, after all
your mother has done, I am compelled to believe in divorce. Now
that you children are grown and we have completely fulfilled our
duties, responsibilities and offices as parents in every way,
there is no longer need for your father and your mother to pull
against one another and fight disgracefully till stark death
closes down in the peace which passeth human understanding.
Therefore, Nathaniel, as one who has reached man’s estate, I
write to you and make my last request. Then I shall give you my
blessing, go my way and never trouble you again—only to remember
you in my prayers. Nathaniel, I want you to help me get a
divorce from your mother. Moreover, I want it at once. This much
is not only my right but your duty. Never mind how the vast
reaches of earthly distance may separate us, remember I am
always the father who gave you birth.
I am not ashamed to write why I want a divorce. The fact is, an
enforced exile in a foreign land, charged with a crime which was
not a crime if my position could only be understood, I have met
a lady who is all which your mother never has been, is not now
and never can be. Beautiful of face and form, talented, poised,
brainy and cultured, I would turn over a new page in life,
redeem the past and live as God intended every man should
live—normally, happily, at peace with his wife and the world.
This is my right, I say. This phase of it you have no license to
question.
So I desire you to engineer a divorce at once. The grounds of
course, would be incompatibility. Your mother must not know of
this—that I wish it—or she will show her inherent meanness and
cheapness at once and oppose it simply because I desire it. You
alone have influence with her. And I am not unprepared to make
it worth your while.
The lady I want to make my _real_ wife is very wealthy. She is a
widow living with her father who is in trade out here. I met her
coming across nine months ago and for the first time in my life
the cup of happiness is held to my lips. It remains to be seen
whether the son for whom I sacrificed twenty-five of the best
years of my life will dash it away.
The day you forward me a copy of the court’s decree, assuring me
I am a free man, I solemnly promise to pay you one thousand
dollars and no questions asked. Of course all this, including my
present whereabouts, is strictly confidential.
I await your reply with interest. In fact, I think I should like
you to cable me an answer—that you are working on the case, that
within the year I may be free. Free! Free! Free!
Your hideously wronged father,
JONATHAN H. FORGE.
Nathan crossed to one of the lobby chairs and sat down. He lighted one
of his cigars absently. Once or twice he smiled bitterly. Then he picked
up the several sheets covered on both sides with his father’s weak,
pothook penmanship and read them again. When his cigar had been smoked
to the end, he went upstairs to the writing room, laid aside hat and
raincoat, lighted a fresh cigar and at twenty minutes to nine o’clock
started his reply. It was ten minutes after one when he signed his name.
For the first time in his life, Nathan unleashed his righteous wrath and
told his father what he thought of him. For the first time, devoid of
religious fetish or mawkish “respect”, the son drew forth the whips of
his scorn and laid them without stint on his father’s naked back. He had
nothing to lose which he cared for, and nothing to gain that he desired.
With a maturing understanding, a cold brain and a righteous anger, he
gave his father to understand in no uncertain terms what he thought of
his “twenty-five years of sacrifice” and his “right to happiness”—with a
strange woman.
“I am not interested in the lady,” he concluded; “not because you want
to shelve mother and take up with another woman but the method you
essay—a rather contemptible method from my standpoint—to go about it.
God was mighty real to you and a hard taskmaster when Edith and I were
growing, reaching out and demanding that nature be answered with the
most natural and normal things of life. Apparently He’s taking a
vacation when you arrive at the place where you want them yourself. I’m
not calling you a hypocrite. If I could, that would explain much. But I
am saying that I’m not made of the stuff to take money for freeing my
father from my mother, that my father may gratify his own happiness
while mother trims hats in a small-town millinery for a handful of
dollars a week. In fact, if it wasn’t coarse, I’d feel like telling you
to take your self-pity, your twisted outlook on life, your belated love
affair and go to the devil. That’s crude. But it would express the state
of my feelings with neatness, conciseness and dispatch.”
Nathan read over the packet of pages he had produced. Then he jogged
them with ink-daubed fingers and folded them into an envelope. With a
consciousness of good work well executed, he stored the addressed
envelope away in his pocket and went back downstairs.
He went out into the city and down Salina Street. He found the all-night
Western Union office open.
He despatched a cable to his father—four words.
“Letter received. Not interested.”
He went back to his hotel, ripped his evening’s work to shreds and
dropped them in his waste basket.
III
Nathan was at home a month later when another letter arrived from Japan.
Milly was down to her mother’s and he was dining from a corner of the
kitchen table when the bell rang and the postman handed it in. Nathan
read it while finishing his lunch.
Tokio, Japan, Sept. 10, 1916.
Nathan Forge, Paris, Vt.
Dear Sir:—
Your cable has reached me, saying you got my letter giving you
your last chance to do the square thing by your father and repay
him for all he has done and suffered for you—and you are not
interested.
I might have known. You are that kind of a son. I am done with
you—done, done, done!
Carefully through my things I have searched and culled out all
that pertains to you; every reminder of you. Out of my heart and
my life I am blotting you. Henceforth my son is dead. I never
had a son.
Certain things which I have carried in my wallet, I am returning
herewith. Cherish them! Save them for the dark hours, the
melancholy twilights, the haunting midnights. Sleep with them
beneath your pillow and take them out in dreams and say: I am
cursed by my father! I am a son outside the pale! I have
desecrated God. I have damned my soul!
Your cable and its unnatural message cuts the last ties binding
me to the past. Henceforth I go alone, a wanderer on the face of
the earth, the cup of happiness dashed from my lips, life an
inferno of What-Might-Have-Been—made so by the boy whom I gave
the breath of life and who now brings down my gray hairs in
sorrow to the grave.
Where I go and what becomes of me, you will never know. You will
wonder after your dear father but the winds shall return no
answer where he has gone—the hideous ingratitude of the course
you have elected to pursue will arise and point taunting fingers
at you. All your joys and happiness shall be blighted. The rain
shall patter down and the night winds whine in the casements.
And to you they shall say—“I am accursed!” I am accursed! My
father has accursed me and nowhere on earth is there peace for
my throbbing head!”
Therefore, farewell! When you look into the faces of your
children, may your crime and ingratitude sear you to madness. In
the midst of your laughter may you be sobered and the nectar of
joy in your glass turn to vinegar. And if in the last great day,
pursuing my right to happiness, I stumble and fall, on your head
be my sin!
Already in the lowest depths of hell (in unhappiness and misery
of spirit) I point my awful finger at you and I cry: “Curse you!
Curse you! Curse you!”
Good-by forever!
JONATHAN HADLEY FORGE.
Nathan looked through what his father had so dramatically enclosed: A
lock of Edith’s baby hair tied with a tiny pink ribbon; a small tintype
of himself and Anna Forge taken at some street fair back in the
Nineties; two snapshots of Nathan taken the year before moving to Paris
from Foxboro Center; a picture postcard of Main Street, Paris—lacking
none of the features which had so depressed Madelaine Theddon—a
newspaper clipping containing the first of Nathan’s poems copied by the
_Sunday Globe_—the cablegram of Nathan’s last message as Johnathan had
received it in Japan.
Nathan soaked a half a doughnut in his lukewarm tea as the pathetic
assortment lay before him. Then he read his father’s letter again and
smiled. He had to smile.
He gathered up the envelope’s contents a quarter of an hour later. He
jogged them together and for want of interest and a better place,
slipped them between an ammonia bottle and the wall at the end of the
shelf above the kitchen sink.
Next noontime Johnathan Hadley Forge, in the lowest depths of hell, was
smeared with copious gobs of whisker-flecked lather from Nathan’s razor.
Nothing else being handy at the moment, Nathan used the letter for
shaving paper!
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