THE LAST STRAW
I
Nathan was facing the prospect of a dreary, rainy Sunday in a
Wilkes-Barre hotel when that “turning-point” telegram arrived from
Thorne. Since that day in Springfield when he had received a wire from
Mildred concerning his child’s death, telegrams had not been without a
flavor of calamity. Yet Thorne’s message on its face looked harmless
enough. It read:
DROP EVERYTHING COME HOME AT ONCE IMPORTANT MISSION FOR YOU. T.
E. THORNE.
An important mission for him! Nathan had a queer, telepathic intuition
that something had happened, or was about to happen, that was to affect
his career and perhaps his whole life vitally. It never left him. In
fact, it grew upon him as he entered Vermont the next afternoon and his
train drew into Paris about half-past seven o’clock.
Usually Nat wired Milly when he was returning from his trips; his wife
was piqued and exasperated when he “walked in on her” with no food ready
in the house or when she was in the midst of neighborhood or family
activities such as occupied her time while her husband was absent. But
he had been so intent on making his trains that this time he had
forgotten. When the man finally alighted on the depot platform Sunday
evening, the place showed no signs of life; not even a Ford taxi met the
train. So Nathan left his suit cases in the baggage room to be brought
up next morning and started toward the business section afoot.
He entered the Metropolitan Drug Store pay-station and called Ted
Thorne. Ted was out for the evening and Nat promised to call him later.
Then he called Milly to inform her that he had returned to town and
would be up in a few minutes. Milly did not answer the ‘phone.
“Probably down to her mother’s,” he said. So he stopped for a lunch at
the Élite, lit a cigar and headed for Preston Hill at a leisurely pace.
This was about half-past eight.
It was one of those blowy nights in early March with the wind drying up
the snow puddles and clouds scurrying across the face of a high white
moon. Spring would be on New England in a handful of weeks. Already most
of the snow had gone and only sickly, dirty patches, the last vestiges
of winter drifts, were disclosed on the northern sides of walls and
fences where the sunlight failed to touch them.
His house was dark when he finally turned into Vermont Avenue. As Milly
had not answered the ‘phone, he thought nothing of it. He went up the
front veranda steps and let himself into the hall with his latchkey. The
warm odor of his own home was pleasant and inviting, the house welcomed
him after his three-weeks’ absence by its mellow darkness. He pressed on
the lamp button in the hall and called his wife’s name. But he received
no answer. The house was very quiet. The wind blew a loose blind
somewhere. On the distant kitchen sink-shelf a brassy alarm clock ticked
faintly. Nathan hung hat and coat on the hall hat-tree and pressed out
the hall light as he moved into the sitting room on the west side.
He pulled the tiny chain on the reading lamp and looked around for his
mail. It contained nothing of interest, most of it being bills. He
glanced over the recent copies of the _Daily Telegraph_. But his
thoughts were upon Ted Thorne and why he should have been called so
abruptly off the road.
After a time the moon got around to where it cast a splotch of
lemon-colored light on the sitting-room floor. The window shades had not
been drawn. Nathan glanced up and saw the cold, round disk behind the
gaunt, waving tree boughs. He turned his chair—a heavy wing-rocker—so
that it faced the window, its back to the room. Then he reached a hand
and pulled off the reading light to enjoy the wild, windy beauty of the
outside night.
He had turned many bitter things over in his mind and it was after nine
o’clock when the man heard a strange sound. It seemed to come from the
rear of the house, out on the back porch beyond the kitchen. At first
Nat thought it some freak of the wind. Then, as the latter died down and
perfect quiet reigned for a moment, the sound came again, sharp and
distinct.
Some one had tried several keys in the back-porch door. Finally they had
found one which fitted. A gust of wind swept through the house and the
door was immediately closed.
Nathan had no desire to startle his wife. He was about to rise and call,
to advise her of his presence in the darkened home, when there came a
thunderous thud in the kitchen and an oath.
A man was in the kitchen! He had fallen over a chair!
Nathan drew back into the protective depths of the rocker. He was
frightened. Most normal people know some degree of terror when it is
evident burglars are in the house. He debated what he should do. Then it
occurred to him to keep silent a moment, to see what the intruder was
after and where he would go.
The burglar apparently righted the chair and groped his way to the
sitting room, where Nathan held his breath and waited, completely hidden
by the enormous back of the rocker. The intruder came in, still groping.
Nathan could hear his deep breathing through the semi-dark.
Apparently the man stood for a time in the center of the room, hesitant.
Then, to Nathan’s bewilderment, he sank down on the sofa. Nathan heard
the springs creak plainly. Next came the scratch of a match, the
silhouette the flare made of adjacent furniture on west wall and
ceiling, and the acrid odor of cigar smoke. A queer burglar, this! He
sat down on the family sofa and lit a smoke before proceeding to his
loot. And Milly might come at any minute.
Milly came. She let herself in the front way. Nathan knew when she had
arrived by another draught of spring wind and the sharp click when the
front door closed and the lock snapped. But she did not turn on the
lights. Her footstep sounded on the hard-wood floor of the hall and he
knew without looking around that she was standing in the door.
The sofa springs creaked. Nathan waited for Milly to shriek when she
beheld a burglar smoking in the room. He had his mind ready to reach for
the chain of the reading lamp and snap it on. After that,—well, Nathan
still knew how to use his fists.
But Milly did not shriek. Instead, he heard her say in the most normal,
natural intonation of voice, softened with a trace of humor:
“Don’t take you long to make yourself comfortable, does it?”
And a man’s coarser bass returned from that dark:
“You bet it don’t! Leave it to your uncle!”
“I hope to Gawd nobody spotted you gettin’ in. That ol’ Miss Pease next
door puts her eyes on the doorstep when she sleeps, same as she puts out
her cat.”
“Naw, I waited until a cloud went over the moon before I left the shadow
o’ the fence. But I did knock my shin over a chair in the kitchen. I’ll
break that dam’ thing if you leave it in my way again—fell over it last
Sunday night, very same way!”
Nathan was too stunned to move. He seemed all at once to have no body,
so completely had all physical sensation fled. He might have been a
disembodied spirit sitting in that chair—which he was, so far as the man
and his wife were concerned. And they thought him six hundred miles
away! He waited. He knew Milly was pulling off her gloves and unpinning
her hat.
“You didn’t light any lights, did you?” It was Milly’s voice that asked
it.
“What th’ hell sort o’ boob do you take me for, Mil? Besides, whatter we
need lights for—you an’ me?”
The sofa springs suddenly creaked with Milly’s added weight.
“Gawd, kiss me, honeybunch! Gimme a good old humdinger. There ain’t
nobody can raise my hair with kissin’ like you can, Si, or anything
else, for that matter. Seems just as if a gorilla had me—and I was
perfectly willin’ the gorilla should!”
They kissed.
Later-day motion-picture censors would have shortened that kiss
considerably, say about forty seconds.
“Honestly, Si,” cried the girl, “when you kiss me like that, I just
wanner die—or wish I could!”
“Some little kisser I am, huh? Nat don’t kiss you like that, now, does
he, what?”
“Oh, Gawd! If he could do it that way—or ever had—maybe you’d never had
the chance, Si. A girl likes to be mauled once in a while—you
know—treated rough! But he’s too much of a high-brow to maul anybody. I
suppose it ain’t poetical!”
Milly laughed. Plumb swore. As for Nathan,—he sank deeper into his
chair. His mind was in that state which a wrecked body sometimes knows
between a mangling accident and the moment when blasted nerves begin to
respond and bring excruciating agony.
“Mil, honestly, this can’t go much longer! You ain’t his wife, Mil. You
never was his wife. He had no business to marry you in the first place.
You belong to me. And the right thing all around would be to either come
out flat-footed and have a show-down, or else run off and just love as
much as we please—forever. I may be a roughneck, Mil, but I hate this
bein’ a sneak!”
“I know, Si, but think o’ the dough I’m layin’ by! I got almost seven
hundred saved right now. Did I tell you about the New York dress? Nat
gimme two hundred and fifty to buy some togs for that high-brow dinner.
Do you know what I did? I got a thing that cost seventeen ninety-eight
and made him think I’d blowed the whole wad. Made two hundred and thirty
at a crack, right there! Gee, he’s easy! He believes anything I tell
him. Just because I’m a woman, he takes everything I say for gospel
truth.”
“I don’t care nothin’ about his money—unless you wanner blow it on
yourself. I got money. And I can get a job anywheres. And honestly, Mil,
I’m dam’ tired and sick every time a blind blows thinkin’ it’s him come
back by surprise to catch us and raise hell.”
“Aw, he wouldn’t raise hell. He ain’t got the starch.” Milly laughed and
apparently pulled Si’s hair. “He’s a high-brow and a poet. Poets don’t
fight!”
“Don’t they, though?” commented Plumb. “I had one scrap with Nat. I
ain’t hankerin’ to mix up in another. He could even gun me for what
we’re doin’ now, Mil, and I wouldn’t have a leg to stand on.”
“He wouldn’t gun you—not if I was around,” snapped Milly. “I’d just like
to see him. He’s the least o’ my worries. I can handle him!”
“But it ain’t alone that, Mil. I want you myself! You’re my class.
Honestly, when I’m at work some days, I got a regularly gnawin’ inside
to feel your arms ’round me and hear your old ribs crackin’ when I
squeeze you in an honest-to-Gawd hug! I wancher always, Mil. I thought a
heap o’ you before you ever took up with him——”
“I thought he was class—and rich,” lamented the girl. “He sure did bunco
me fierce.”
“Well, yer kid’s gone and he don’t love you no more or he wouldn’t go
off months at a stretch and leave you—exposed to me!” Si laughed. “Mil,
you and me just got to fix this up. It’d probably jolt His Nibs terrible
to have a divorce. Besides, he’d probably start messin’ things up. Still
it oughta be done. Where’s he now? When’s he comin’ home?”
“He oughta be doin’ Pennsylvania this week. It’s his time for it. He’ll
be back about a week from Thursday night.”
“Mil, what th’ hell do we care for him or anybody? Let’s cut out this
sneakin’-in-the-back-door business. Let’s blow!”
There was silence for a long time after that.
“Where’d we go, Si?”
“I gotta swell chance to go down to Jersey and get a job in a shipyards.
They’re payin’ big money for riveters. A feller was tellin’ to the shop
yesterday that if we get fightin’ the Germans, them that works on ships
won’t have to go across. Let’s blow, Mil! Let’s get outta here for good
and all!”
“There’s Ma and Pa and the kids——”
“Yer Ma and Pa wanner see you happy, don’t they? And they know Nat ain’t
doin’ it. Then what’s the answer? Besides, I can get along with your Pa
a lot better’n Nat. Yer Pa and me speak the same language!”
Another lunge of the couch springs.
“Treat me rough, kid!” cried the girl softly. “Treat me rough enough
and—I might!”
Nathan reached up and pulled on the light.
II
Milly shrieked. Plumb sat stunned. He blinked in the abrupt illumination
like an imbecile.
Nathan arose to his full height. He viewed the two. He drew a long
breath for strength, poise and self-control. Then he leaned back against
the table and regarded them gravely.
Milly sat up on the edge of the sofa. Her hair was down and her bodice
open. Hairpins dropped on the hard, polished floor at her feet.
“Where’d you come from?” she cried when she could speak.
“This chair! I’ve been sitting here since nine o’clock.”
“You heard?”
“Yes—I heard! How could I help it?”
Milly mustered up her courage.
“You dirty, eavesdropping sneak!”
Nathan raised his hand. On his harrowed face was a sad, disillusioned
smile. He addressed himself to Plumb.
“How long has it been going on, Si?”
The steam-fitter was dressed in his Sunday-evening best. His
Sunday-evening best was slightly rumpled by his liaison with Milly. Once
he cast his eyes about as though debating whether to try for the door or
dash through the window glass.
“How long has what been going on?” he asked weakly.
“Come, come! Let’s not spar. It isn’t necessary.” Nathan took his hands
from the table edge and folded his arms. “You needn’t try to get up
nerve to leap through the glass. I’m not going to hurt you!—I may be a
poet but I’m not quite a fool.”
Si breathed easier. He sat up. They were a cheap, disheveled,
foolish-looking pair, ranged there side by side, a cow of a woman and a
bull of a man. Was there any reason why they should not seek each
other’s embrace?
“I been lovin’ Mil ever since you married her.” The steam-fitter
confessed it sheepishly, picking at his broken finger nails. “I was
lovin’ of her when you stepped in to the shop and cut me out. If you’re
goin’ to blame anybody, blame yourself!”
“I am blaming myself,” Nathan returned quietly. “All I can’t understand
is, Milly—how could you do it?”
“Do what?” snapped the girl.
“All the time I was trying to do things for you—get you this
home—furnish it as you wanted—buy you clothes—take you with me on my
trips—introduce you to people in New York—hand you out more money than
you’d ever be able to earn yourself—and all the time you loved another
man behind my back! You were carrying on with him while I had the utmost
confidence in you—at least, I refused to believe what all the town tried
to tell me.”
Milly began to cry.
“It was little Mary,” she sobbed. “You was her father. Besides, you’d
never understand how or why I loved Si. I didn’t suppose you ever
could.”
“I should think you’d have felt like a virago,” declared Nathan
disgustedly. “What else can you call yourself?” He looked down upon her
as upon some biological specimen that was exhibiting strange phenomena.
“I don’t know what it means, but I can guess—and if I’m that for lovin’
Si more’n you—well, I ain’t ashamed of it! It’s bein’ done every day!
You could go see a few classy films if you wasn’t so high-brow——!”
“That’s plenty, Milly. You love Plumb enough to follow him into
disgrace. Is that it?”
“With my kind of love there ain’t no disgrace. In ‘Sex and the High
Heart’ it showed where——”
“And you love Milly enough to make her your legal wife?” Nathan
interrupted in hard voice to the steam-fitter.
“You betcha life I do! I’d——”
“Then take her!” snapped Nathan contemptuously. With lips closed
tightly, he turned. The episode was at an end.
“Huh! You want to get rid o’ me, don’t you?—Same’s your father got rid
o’ your mother! I might o’ known!”
“Shut up, Mil! Don’t be a fool!” ordered Plumb. He had a man’s brain and
masculine grasp of proportion, sluggish, but equipped nevertheless with
a certain amount of common sense. “You mean this, Nat?”
“Do I look as if I were jesting? Two wrongs never yet made a right. I
wronged Milly when I took her from you. Every day since, I’ve wronged
myself. I see now—as I should have seen from the case of my father and
mother—that all the legal and religious promises in the world can’t
affect raw nature. People mated will love, honor and cherish one
another. People not mated may live in the same house, eat at the same
table, sleep in the same bed for a thousand years. Every moment of those
thousand years they’ll be prostitutes. I see it now. And any one who
teaches or preaches differently is an ass. Get out!”
Plumb heard and agreed inwardly that Nat _was_ a high-brow. “Must o’
swallowed a dictionary!” he explained afterward. But from the dangerous
predicament he needed no second invitation to exit.
“But I gotta get my clothes!” cried Milly, “and all my things——!”
“All your ‘things’ will be sent to your mother’s house in the morning.
Get out!”
“Then you mean for me to get a divorce?”
“I’ll get the divorce, thank you! I’ve taken this sort of thing lying
down long enough. I said get out!”
“Come on, Mil,” ordered Silas. “I know a place we can go for to-night.
How long’ll it take you to get that divorce, Nat?”
III
Ted Thorne, in the library of his home at ten-thirty that night, beheld
the face of his young salesman with anxiety.
“For heaven’s sake, Nat, what’s the matter? Sick?”
“No, just a bit upset, that’s all, Ted. You wired me to come home in a
hurry and I forgot to telegraph my wife. I reached the house to find——”
“Yes?”
“That she loved that Plumb fellow—the steam-fitter that works for
Holcomb.”
“You caught them?”
“Yes. I caught them!”
Nathan stretched his legs and drew a long sigh. His lips were very firm.
His self-control was admirable.
“And what’s the answer?” demanded Thorne.
“She’s gone with Plumb. I told her to go.”
“You told her to go! My God! I’d have got a gun and plugged that
steam-fitter so full of holes——”
“The man who’ll so lower himself as to run amuck and shoot anybody up
for the sake of a woman who doesn’t love him enough to be true to him
deserves exactly what the jury hands him in case they fail to disagree!”
“But there’s such a thing as the Unwritten Law and——”
“Unwritten fiddlesticks! Let’s get down to business. What’s this
important mission you want to send me on?”
“Suppose we smoke,” suggested Ted weakly. He was too upset at the moment
to discuss business. When the cigars had been lighted he sat with his
chin deep in his chest for a time and then said frankly, “You’ve had a
sort of a rotten experience with women, haven’t you, Nat? Oh, I know all
about it! Most of the town does. Your mother—that Gardner girl—now your
wife—say, Nat, the marvel to me is, that regardless of it all, there
doesn’t seem to be the least shred of cynicism in your whole make-up.
I’ve got to hand it to you, Nat. I don’t understand it.”
“It’s nothing but common sense, Ted. What’s the use of showing yourself
a mean, small-bored, surly little runt, rooting about the earth or
frothing cheap spleen, just because you haven’t had the chance to know
the right people? It’s this way, Ted: When I was a kid, and even later
in my ‘teens, I felt that I’d been handed a raw deal. I got an awful
dose of it, or thought I did—such a dose of it that, frankly, I began to
get curious about it. I couldn’t place any other construction on it
finally, Ted, but that somewhere, somehow, there was a purpose behind
it. Unconsciously these last few years, I’ve been searching to determine
just what that purpose could be. I’ve searched the Bible. I’ve read a
lot of what all the big thinkers in other ages have left behind. I’ve
watched people—other folks in trouble. Why should some fellows be born
with silver spoons in their mouths and a whole regiment of solicitous
relatives standing around at birth and afterward, to help them stir with
it, and other fellows have to scratch for themselves, buy their own
spoon and do most of their own stirring? Ted, there must be a reason
behind all this hodgepodge of life. Ever stop to think about it? Human
vicissitudes, Ted, seem to be the only things in the universe that
aren’t subject to pretty well-defined laws for pretty sharply defined
purposes. The seasons come and go—seed time and growing time and
harvest—for a purpose. Showers follow muggy weather—to water the thirsty
earth. Even the very nitrogen from our lungs in devitalized exhalation
becomes food for the fairest flowers. It’s a pretty intricate universe,
Ted, with precious little happening by chance. All but the ups and downs
of human life. Do you mean to tell me that human life, the highest
organism in all nature, runs hit-or-miss? I can’t believe it, Ted. The
very fact that there’s no apparent reason for all our ups and downs
convinces me there _is_ a reason. And it’s simple as dirt. There’s some
of us deficient in some attribute or other that only raw dealing and
struggle make strong. Others have follies and weaknesses. Sorrow and
hard luck burn the dross away or show the whole stuffing of us is dross
and not worth the Almighty monkeying with at all. The whole trouble
happens to be that we poor mortals don’t know what the assay of
ourselves was—before we came into the darned world and started living in
it in the first place. So we can’t know what we need and what we don’t
need. And we kick and we caterwaul and we revile and we squirm. Or we
show we’re only cheap stuff and ‘turn cynical’ as you call it. But I’m
beginning to believe, Ted, that people who let themselves sink into
self-pity and get cynical and rail against the ups and downs of life are
only cheating themselves. They’re probably deliberately knuckling under
on precisely the load of trial and tribulation they need to make them
strong—in this world—or for some other race—on some distant
planet—further on! Got it? ‘Them’s my sentiments’ on the woman mess. The
class is dismissed. Now let’s get down to business!”
“You’re a philosopher!” gasped Ted Thorne weakly.
“Until a man becomes a philosopher in some form or other, he’s going to
have a mighty hard scratch in this world, Ted, to dig up reasons for all
that happens to him.”
Ted Thorne looked at his salesman in frank admiration. He saw a
prematurely old young fellow with fine flecks of gray beginning to show
at his temples, even at twenty-seven. There were deep creases of still
deeper strength about his mouth. His eyes were calmer and held a wounded
look at times which melted into growing reassurance that life, after
all, was mostly what we make it. Nose was prominent. Mouth and chin were
stubborn, though lips came together evenly. His head was perfectly
proportioned. His hands were the slender hands of the artist, the
builder, the creator. He had the properties of piano wire, somehow—wire
capable of producing the finest melodies in all nature when properly
tightened and tuned—yet strong enough to bear a weight more out of
proportion to its size and stress than any other substance in existence.
“Nathan,” he said gravely, “we’re going to have war; did you know it?”
“I hope not!”
“All the same, we’re going to have war. And if we have war, there’ll be
a draft. Before that comes, I want to utilize your services in doing
something for the company we can’t spare any other man to do. I believe
it’ll be extremely agreeable to yourself, too—a change—an education—an
opportunity to get out and see what the world is like. I want to send
you abroad.”
“Abroad!” gasped Nathan.
“Your wife’s elimination comes at an especially happy time, old man.
Besides, a change of scene may soften the sting of the experience. How
long will it take to start the divorce business?”
“A week to start it, perhaps. The case can’t be heard until June,
anyhow.”
“It’ll be purely mechanical, of course, seeing it probably won’t be
contested.”
Nathan nodded.
“Where do you want me to go?” he asked quietly. “France?”
“Siberia!”
Thorne made the announcement as he might have named Rutland, Bennington
or Troy, New York.
“What!”
“Here’s the story, Nat. About eight months ago we manufactured a lot of
shirts for the Russian government. Ships were at a premium to transport
goods across the Atlantic. Beside, they might be subject to seizure
going up through the Baltic if the German fleet came out. So we routed
those goods across America and shipped them over the Pacific. But you
know what’s happening up in Russia. And here we are, with about forty
thousand dollars’ worth of goods stuck somewhere in the Orient, and
what’s going to become of them if we don’t send a representative to look
out for them, the Lord only knows. Nat, the directors couldn’t give you
that New York job because of the impediment your wife was—I’d just as
soon say so now. But we can give you this trip and a bigger job when you
get back, if the war turns out the way we hope. We want you to go to
Vladivostok within the next thirty days and look after the placing of
those goods in the hands of the proper parties.”
“Whew!” exclaimed Nathan. “A mere trifle! What else?”
“Nat, old man, we’ve got confidence that you can work it out, or we
wouldn’t send you. We’ll get your passports and routing—to sail from San
Francisco on or about the first of April. And you can have until that
time to wind up your affairs. You may be gone a devil of a time and
circle the world before you get back. But it’ll be a college education
and I don’t want you to refuse.”
“I’ll go—of course,” assented the lad. But for a time his gaze was
blank.
He was thinking of his father, last heard from in Japan—directly in his
route.
IV
A dour time followed when Mrs. Anna Forge heard that Nathan had been
slated for a trip to the Far East.
She acclaimed in the highways and byways that the Thornes were sending
her boy to his death, to be gnawed by wolves and lashed with knouts. She
visited old Jim Thorne in his offices and told him what she thought of
him. Nathan had to be called to take her away. The week before Nat left
town she clawed his face when he tried to get her out of my house,
whither she had come to invoke my intercession in stopping the mad
enterprise.
“After all I’ve done for him, he goes off to the other side the world
and leaves me! Casts me aside like an old shoe! He shan’t go! He shan’t!
He shan’t!”
It developed that she was not half so much concerned for Nathan’s
welfare, or what might possibly happen to him in the Orient, as she was
for herself and how she was going to live in the meantime.
With Nathan’s wife eliminated at last, of course God had shown plainly
enough that He wished the son to devote the rest of his days and dollars
to his darling mother.
She went and saw a lawyer about it and when the lawyer was cool, she
visited the editor of the local paper and wanted a “piece” inserted
therein, flaying the lawyer alive and exposing him as a double-dealer, a
horse thief, a wife beater and a villain of the deepest dye.
Nathan gave her a hundred dollars and a five-pound box of chocolate
caramels—the kind with nuts in them—whereupon Mrs. Forge conceded that
Siberia might have its good points and would he write to her every week
and be sure to wear his heavy underwear in those awful Siberian winters?
Nathan promised and Mrs. Forge departed through the town to spend
seventy-two of the hundred dollars before five o’clock on clothes for
Edith’s youngsters. Not because Edith’s youngsters especially needed the
clothes, but because Mrs. Forge had the hundred dollars.
------------------------------------------------------------------------