FIRST LIGHT
I
The afternoon and evening before Nathan’s departure he spent with me. An
arrangement was finally effected whereby Mrs. Forge received the money
accruing from the sale of Nathan’s household goods, and with an
additional sum deposited with me to keep her during his absence, she
went down to start living with Edith. Her own mother had died at the
time Nathan worked in the tannery and she “was on the outs” with her
three brothers and their wives. So bag and baggage upon Edith she
descended and mother and daughter “had words” before she’d been in
Edith’s home six hours. That, however, was no concern of Nathan’s prior
to his departure. He was very patient and tender with her when he saw
her off on her train. But he turned to me with a philosophical smile
afterward and remarked, “Of all troubles, Bill, there are no troubles
quite like family troubles, are there?” Father Adam in the Garden
probably originated the remark after the well-known dispossess notice.
Anyhow, the afternoon and evening before Nat’s departure he spent with
me.
It was a sunny day in late March and it cleared off into a beautiful
starlit evening. We roamed about town and talked of many things before
dinner, for deep down within both of us was the vague dread that perhaps
it was our last walk and talk, that we might never see each other again.
Then in the evening we sat in my living room and smoked our pipes, and
the past was brought back vividly again.
I have already referred to the group of small boys we encountered
interning mimic Huns for sedition and the reminiscence it called up of
the afternoon back in Spanish War time when we played “Hang the Spy” and
“Slaves in the Dismal Swamp.” These were only two of many anecdotes over
which we had much laughter to hide the ache in our hearts.
We talked of the day we had first met in the school yard in East
Foxboro; those walks homeward in the late afternoons; the day that
Bernie Gridley had driven old Caleb’s mare home in terror because Nat
wished to present her with a deceased rodent as a gift with which she
could “trim up a room.” We lived again our early days in Paris, Bernie’s
birthday party when Nathan presented the little girl with a bust of
Cæsar, the “happiest day” off in the woods at the Sunday-school picnic.
“By the way,” said I suddenly, “what’s become of Bernie, anyhow? I don’t
think she’s been back here to Paris since her mother died.”
“Old Caleb told me one evening, Bill, and I’ve always considered it
confidential; but I guess there’s no harm in telling you—now. Most every
one in Paris thinks she went abroad after school, with some friends from
Springfield.”
“And didn’t she?”
“No, she didn’t. Bernie got into trouble with a man. The trip abroad was
only camouflage to cover up the scandal. She never went abroad. Her baby
didn’t live and I guess it hardened Bernie—the whole experience. And if
the truth were known, I think that’s what killed her mother. It was a
body blow to the Duchess ‘after the nice way in which Bernice-Theresa
had always been brought up.’ You remember how she suddenly withdrew from
her grand direction of village and church affairs under the excuse she
had heart trouble. It wasn’t heart trouble. The woman’s bump of ego got
the _coup de grâce_, Bill. It finished her!”
“Old Caleb knew?”
“In time he found out. But—poor old Caleb! Do you know what he remarked
to me one night, Bill?”
“I can’t imagine.”
“It was the Sunday night that I’d first quarreled with Mildred because
her father brought gin into our house and got drunk at Sunday dinner. I
went up to spend the evening with Caleb and get cheered. I had to tell
him something of what I was going through with Milly. That recalled my
experience with Carol and even something of my earlier calf-love for his
daughter. He was silent for a long time and then he sighed. ‘Bub,’ said
he, ‘don’t think you’re the only man on earth, young or old, that ain’t
been able to get along with women nor understand ’em.’ You can imagine
how he said it. ‘You’ll find there’s lots of fellows can pal with men
and make friendships the grave can’t bury. But when it comes to the
weaker sex, life’s just one dam’ thing after another. And most of ’em
wears petticoats and gets their way with tears,’ said he. Poor old
Gridley! I guess he’s had his family troubles, too.”
“But what became of Bernie?”
“Old Caleb saw that Bernie had been through some terrific experience and
wasn’t long worming it out. He didn’t have much to say. All the same, he
wanted her to come back to Paris and keep house for him. They quarreled
before Bernie returned to Springfield—with the mother not two days
buried. And I guess Bernie said some snippy things that cut the old man
pretty deep. It seems old Caleb had a love affair when a young man, but
the girl broke it off because she didn’t think herself competent to be
his wife. He stood in just that awe of the sex that he didn’t try to
persist and overcome that foolish little objection. And the
disappointment gashed deep. He married the Duchess much as I married
Mildred. The wound healed but the scars never left his heart. And Bernie
learned of it and twitted him about it. Her principal indictment of old
Caleb was that he had been content to remain a small-town man and bring
her up as a small-town girl so that when she got out in the world ‘among
real people’, as she called it, she was always at a disadvantage.”
“There was a rumor about the place a few years ago that she married a
Chicago millionaire.”
“She did. But whether she found happiness with him seems to be unknown,
at least back here at home. I don’t believe her dad has heard a word
from her since she left in high dudgeon after her mother’s funeral.”
Nathan paced along by my side for a quarter-mile in silence. Then he
laughed sadly and said, “Bill, did you ever know about me asking Bernie
to marry me, the week before she went away to school?”
“Marry you! Why, Bernie was only about fifteen——”
“I know it! That’s why it’s so amusing—about as funny as the ‘Death of
Little Nell.’ It was down along the pathway through the Haskell
meadow—the ‘short cut’ from Matthews Court to Windsor Street—all built
up now with bungalows. I met her and proposed to her desperately—poor
short-trousered little ass that I was. But she was mad at me; she said I
hadn’t the backbone of a fish. If I was half a man I’d get a gun and
shoot dad for whaling me that picnic day in front of everybody. She
ended by calling me a freckled-faced little frump and declared when she
married any one, it was going to be a millionaire. Well, she made good
there, all right. But the way she scorched me at the time surely
blistered for many a month afterward. I remember I returned home, took
all her letters and tied them up with a ribbon—my first rosary. I hid
them away out in the ell attic of the Spring Street house. By gosh, they
must be there yet! I haven’t thought of them from that day to this!”
So that last walk of Nathan’s and mine ended by making a trip to the
Spring Street house; my friend had a little hunch that he would like to
see if those letters were still hidden there and read them over again,
because of what they had once stood for in his precocious young life. A
family by the name of Bailey had bought the Spring Street place and
grudgingly gave consent for us to search the garret. Nathan found the
packet, laid there on the mellow, brown rafters in the dark through
sixteen years and smelling acridly of dried plaster, dank soot and moist
creosote from the near-by kitchen chimney.
After dinner that night, as we smoked our pipes, Nathan opened them,—a
packet of boy-and-girl love notes faded with the flight of time and
bringing back the joys of Long Ago. Scrawled sheets where “he was mad”
and “she was mad” and he had spoken to some other little girl yesterday,
and she had permitted Sammy Sargent to walk home from school with her
and carry her books. There were dozens of them. And though Nathan smiled
at the “till-death-do-us-part” endings, I knew they were vibrating raw
heart chords. Excoriations of Nathan’s dad, intrigues for him to “skin
out” and go with her to parties, little petulant fault findings, all
were very sweet now, misty, as those years had become with the nebulous
glow of Boyhood Romance.
“Bill,” said my friend finally, “I’ve got a hunch I’ll call off in
Chicago and look Bernie up. I might return these letters to her as an
excuse for seeing her, if nothing else. I’d like to talk over old times
with Bernie, even if I was a mushy young calf. Yes, I’ll stop off in
Chicago and look Bernie up. After all, a man rarely forgets his first
love, never mind how many follow.”
We mentioned Milly only once in our talk that last night. She had
disappeared from town immediately and so had Plumb.
“It was all my mistake—marrying her in the first place, Bill,” he said.
“I had brains enough to know better but not the common sense to exercise
them. And I was lonely—God, how lonely! Poor Milly! After all, _she_ was
more sinned against than sinning.”
He went away on the same train next forenoon on which Carol Gardner had
left our homely little railroad station, nine years before.
Only it wasn’t raining the morning Nathan left. The sun was
shining—shining gloriously—bright and warm. I was too deeply concerned
with bidding my friend good-by, however, to attach much significance to
the sunshine.
So we parted—for War!
Old Caleb Gridley’s train reached Paris at twelve o’clock. He missed
bidding Nat farewell by an hour.
II
Queer things happen in life. Just beyond Buffalo that night, the train
newsboy came through, crying the evening dailies. The papers were black
with headlines. The big munitions plant at Russellville, New Jersey,
engaged in making shells for the British government, had blown up that
afternoon, killing hundreds, destroying the town. The conflagration was
still burning, with shells exploding in the vitals of the flames like a
small battle transferred to this side the Atlantic.
Nathan read the account of the disaster like a hundred million others
that evening, thinking “Such is war!”
He found my wire when he reached The Morrison in Chicago. I thought he
should know; the gypsy trail of the world spread before him now with
many mystic and perhaps romantic twists and turns yet to be negotiated.
I worded my telegram thus:
MILDRED RICHARDS IN LIST RUSSELLVILLE DEAD IS MILLY FOLKS JUST
RECEIVED WORD PLUMB HAD TAKEN JOB SHIPYARDS near-by IS UNHURT NO
TRACE MILLY FOUND BEST WISHES PLEASANT TRIP MOTHER WIFE AND SELF
WILLIAM.
III
It was a week before Nathan located Bernice. Not because he did not know
her address; he had procured it from Elinore Carver who had married a
local furniture man and with whom Bernie had kept up an intermittent
correspondence since leaving Paris. It was because Milly’s passing
affected him grievously. Somehow it was difficult to shake off the
presentiment that in ordering her from the house that Sunday night, he
had unwittingly sent her to her death. Certainly she would not have left
with Plumb so soon and gone to work in the munitions plant. I think he
went to Bernie’s apartment on the North Shore, seeking some poor solace
in a woman’s company. Anyhow, thinking to surprise her and never
dreaming she would not be glad to see him, he dressed in dinner clothes
one Wednesday evening and set out for the address Elinore had supplied.
The place where Bernice now resided was an exclusive apartment, with an
onyx marble entrance and a negro ‘phone attendant to announce callers to
rooms above.
“Yo’ is one of de guests, ah s’pose,” commented the African, and then,
before the puzzled Vermonter could respond, “De guests is to go up
wifout bein’ announced. Flo’ Three, ’partment Three-Fifty-Fo’.”
Nathan went up in the automatic lift.
A Japanese boy answered his ring and immediately the door was opened,
from regions behind came jazzy music.
“May I see Mrs. DuMont?” asked my friend.
The Oriental grinned and held wide the door.
“You please to give me your name,” suggested the Jap. “I tell her to
come out to see you.”
“What’s going on—a party?”
But the Oriental only grinned the more and shrugged his shoulders.
“Well, tell her a man from her old home town is here and would like a
few moments with her. Forge! Nathan Forge!”
And in a few moments Bernie came.
Nathan was shocked, badly shocked. He had seen Bernice on the streets of
Paris once, at the time of her mother’s funeral. But he had not beheld
her in a “close up” or spoken with her since the day in Haskell’s
pasture. He looked at the woman approaching him now and—and she was
Bernice Gridley—but oh, how changed!
Nathan knew she was of an age with himself, just turning twenty-seven.
She looked forty and not very successful in looking it, either. She was
half a head shorter than Nathan and had to look slightly upward into his
eyes. Yet she was big-boned and coarsened, and the daring gown she wore
did nothing to soften the outlines of coarseness in her figure. The gown
was plainly expensive, yet on Bernie it was hideous. It was dull green,
to contrast with her once-gold hair. But it was cut from the bust down
almost to her waist in the back and the display of nudity was disgusting
and repellent, particularly so because Bernie had lost her girlhood
plumpness. Her bones poked through her skin and her sawtooth spine
reminded Nathan of some pictures he had once seen of starving Cubans,
taken nude to show their pathetic emaciation. The woman carried a large
green fan which she now held against her flat breasts in a manner that
only called attention to her bizarre costume and admitted that
subconsciously it shamed her.
Nathan was so stunned by the change that for a few seconds he could only
stare, his tongue glued to the roof of his mouth. Bernice took it for
self-consciousness and provincial awkwardness, traits she detested. They
reminded her too vividly of her humble origin and “what she had risen
from.”
“Well, Nathan?” she demanded sharply. “Where did you come from?”
Nathan fought for his wits.
“I’m—on my way to the Orient,” he stammered. “It’s—the first time—I was
ever in Chicago—and I thought I’d stop off and look you—up!”
“The Orient! What in the world are you going to the Orient for? Aren’t
you afraid you’ll get lost out there—such a long way from Vermont?”
“Of course, if you don’t care about seeing me, Bernie, I won’t impose on
you,” returned Nathan stiffly.
Bernice covered her annoyance with a forced smile.
“What did you want to see me about?” she demanded.
Well, what did he want to see her about? It would be a foolish
reason—the true one—to explain.
“I—I—haven’t seen you for going on sixteen years, Bernie. And I
thought—I thought—well, I saw your father about a month ago.”
“Yes? How is he?” Bernice asked it perfunctorily, as she might have
asked after sundry unfortunates in devastated Belgium.
“He’s—well,” gulped Nathan. He looked down at his hands, raised his eyes
to Bernie’s, smiled foolishly, dropped them again in embarrassment.
Bernice made no comment on her father being well. And Nathan saw how
life had hardened her. The woman was adamant. Her eyes, as she watched
the man’s embarrassment, seemed to declare, “Oh, what a hick you are!
Oh, what a hick!”
“Well?” she suggested irritably.
“I won’t take any of your time to-night, Bernie. But I would like to
talk over old times with you before I go—on!”
“I’m having a few friends in to-night, so I can’t see you. But if you’ll
come to-morrow night, I’ll try and give you a few minutes. How’s your
wife? Is she with you?”
“I have no wife. She—died.”
“What business are you in now?”
“Until lately I’ve been on the road for the Thornes. They took me off
and are sending me to Vladivostok on special business.”
“How’s your father and mother?”
Nathan looked up in surprise.
“Didn’t you hear? About father’s going away and all?”
“Oh, yes. Seems to me I did. He stole a lot of money and left for parts
unknown, didn’t he?”
“Yes,” said Nat in a whisper. His thoughts turned to a little packet of
love notes in his pocket. Could it be possible this hardened woman and
himself had ever loved?—That she was the little girl by the side of the
stream that picnic day—that together they had crouched beneath his coat
from a shower and she had kissed him.
“Well, come back to-morrow night,” ordered Bernice. “I’ve got to get
back to my guests.”
“Your husband——” began Nathan.
Bernie started.
“I have no husband,” she snapped angrily. “I divorced him three years
ago.”
“Oh!” said Nathan quickly.
IV
He went back the next night.
Bernice received him in a pale-blue smock, her hair twisted up in
slovenly fashion at the back of her neck, a black band about her head.
The smock looked greasy. Bernie was smoking a cigarette as she admitted
him herself.
“It’s Hashi’s night out,” she explained. “We’ll be alone and can talk.
Come in!” And she led him into a spacious studio room behind, where the
evening before the music had been playing. Nathan was clothed again in
his Tuxedo. Bernie surveyed him and smiled quietly, aggravatingly.
She shoved a chair across for him and reclined on a chaise-longue. She
did not offer to apologize for not including him among her guests of the
prior night, although Nathan soon learned why she had not done so, and
not because the woman was ashamed of her guests, either.
“Now,” declared Bernie, “tell me all about that damned hick town of
Paris!”
Nathan honestly tried to do so. It was sketchy.
“But when did your wife die?” the woman demanded.
“May I smoke?” the man asked.
“Smoke? Of course you can smoke! Don’t be such a disgusting rube. I’m
smoking, am I not?”
He lit a cigar.
“I had some trouble with my wife, Bernie. She was untrue to me while I
was away on the road. I came back one night and caught her in another
man’s arms. She left Paris next day. You read about the Russellville
explosion last week? She was either blown to atoms or burned to death—in
it!”
For a moment Bernie forgot her pose and looked frankly incredulous. Then
she tapped her cigarette and sniffed.
“I don’t know that I blame her, Nat. You always were rather impossible
from a woman’s standpoint, you know.”
Nathan let it pass.
“I’ve brought you something, Bernie, that you might like to keep,” he
said. And upon the table at her elbow he laid the little packet of
childhood love letters.
“For God’s sake, what’re those?”
“The letters we wrote, Bernie, while we were boy-and-girl sweethearts in
the graded school together.”
Bernie dropped her cigarette. She had a bad time recovering it and the
fire burned a small hole in the smock before she had done so. She swore.
“But what the devil do you suppose I want of them now?”
“I don’t know, Bernie. I thought perhaps they might mean something to
you—little relics from the past, as I’ve always regarded them.”
“You always were a sickly, sentimental fool, Nat. As for the past, the
less we discuss it or think about it, the better I’ll be pleased. I’ve
had trouble enough weaning myself ‘from the past.’ The present and
future gives me bother enough, God knows. As for Paris, I hate it as I
hate copperheads in a mangrove swamp. I’m done with it forever and never
want to be dragged back into it again—not even to be buried.”
“It’s your old home town, Bernie. You can’t get back of that.”
“I don’t want any ‘old home town.’ I’ve risen above it. I was simply
unlucky enough to be born in the little tank-burg, and that’s plenty.
And as soon as possible I shook clear from it and all it stood for! I
got over being a hick quite a while ago, Nathan. And I hate everything
that reminds me of it as the devil hates holy water. I don’t want to
have to think of the disgusting depths I’ve come up from.”
“I’m sorry, Bernie.”
“You’re not half so sorry as I am! Paris nearly did for me. Father and
mother—especially mother!—ugh!”
“What about your mother? You thought she was pretty classy once——”
“Nathan Forge! Don’t say ‘classy’ or I’ll scream. More provincialism!
‘Classy’ was one of mother’s favorite words. The other was ‘blood.’
Blood! And for all her grand airs, she was cheap as dirt! But how could
I know it until I got out in the world and had to suffer for it? And
God, what a Golgotha it’s been! When I first married Wallace and was
taken into his family, life was one long nightmare of ‘break’ after
‘break’ before his people. They were Real Blood. And they looked down on
me—righteously—from the day he brought me home until the day I divorced
him. I’ve had enough of vulgarians and lowbrows. I’ll have you know I’m
a _lady_!” And in proof that she was a lady, Bernice lit another
cigarette and inhaled the smoke.
“I apologize, Bernice,” the man offered.
“Oh, you needn’t apologize. Don’t depreciate yourself. That’s ‘hick’
too! And don’t sit sprawled out so, as though you didn’t know what to do
with your hands and your feet. Paris is stamped all over you, from the
cravat in your collar to the cut of your shoes. And yet Ted Thorne is
sending you to the Orient to represent him! Oh, well, after all, he’s
‘hick’ too. Probably doesn’t know any better. It’s none of my business!”
Nathan’s face burned. She was the same old Bernie. He might have known.
He tried to appear at ease—although nothing the woman could have done
would have made him more self-conscious—and he smoked for a moment in
perturbed silence. She broke that silence by exclaiming angrily:
“And I wish, as a favor to me, that you’d stop eating that cigar! And
I’ll bet it cost five cents and came from Tom Edwards’ cigar store next
to the newspaper office——”
“It cost twenty cents,” defended Nat, with foolish ire.
“I’m not going by the cost. I’m going by the smell! Just goes to show
how much bringing up you’ve had. If you didn’t come from a small town,
you’d know more than to drag out a heavy, offensive cigar in front of a
lady; you’d smoke a delicate, gentlemanly cigarette.”
“I don’t smoke cigarettes,” the other replied dully.
“Well, you would if you weren’t a rube. Thank God I didn’t introduce you
to those people I had in here last evening! I suppose you’d have pulled
out one of those sickening cabbages and lighted up right in my
drawing-room.”
Unconsciously Nat’s eyes swept the apartment. It didn’t look like a
drawing-room.
Bernie’s tone suddenly softened. Perhaps it was the sudden misery and
pain of self-consciousness in the man’s eyes. She leaned over with her
elbows on her knees and the cigarette fumes bathing her colorless face.
“Natie, tell me something. Hasn’t anybody ever broken the news to you
what an awful hick you are—and have always been?”
“N-N-No!” choked the young man.
The woman regarded him gravely for a quarter moment. Then as though to
herself she remarked:
“Honestly, I almost think it’s my Christian duty, as a woman and a
one-time friend of yours, to hold up a mirror in front of you and let
you look at yourself properly.”
Nathan arose, walked to the window and threw out the offensive cigar.
“What did you do then?” cried Bernie hysterically.
“Threw out my cigar, of course. You said you didn’t like it.”
“Yes. But where did you throw it? Out of one of my windows—like a Polack
at a drink-fest down by the railroad yards on a Sunday afternoon.
Suppose there’s somebody down in the court that happens to know my
window! What will they think of me, when my window opens and rains down
nasty cigar butts? Oh, Nathan, in God’s name, where is your bringing
up?”
“I guess I haven’t had very—much,” the poor man choked.
“You never said a truer thing in your life! And stop walking the floor!
As though we were married and having a quarrel! Come and sit down
quietly and _poised_—as a gentleman should—and let me show you how very
impossible you are to a well-bred lady!”
Nathan obediently returned to his chair.
“In the first place, why did you come up here to-night in dinner
clothes!—just for a social call when you knew I’d be in careless
négligée myself?”
“I didn’t know it. Anyhow, to wear a business suit——”
“I shouldn’t have minded you in a business suit! Just goes to show how
little you Forges understand women! But we’ll let the dinner clothes
pass. Oh, Nathan! Nathan! Nathan!” The last word was almost a hysterical
shriek.
“Now what am I doing?” cried the thoroughly unnerved fellow.
“Picking at your thumb nail!” cried Bernie. From the cold horror in her
voice one might imagine Nathan had drawn the decapitated head of a child
from his clothes and juggled it to amuse himself while she talked.
“Excuse me,” he muttered. And he dropped his hands in his lap and looked
the picture of misery. What could he do but sit quietly like a tailor’s
dummy and take the hot-shot she poured into him, broadside? And she
poured it. There was no doubt about it. She poured it.
“Look at you!” she cried witheringly, her neurasthenia getting the upper
hand. “Feet clad in rakish patent leather shoes! Dinner clothes, when
you know you’re from a little tank-town anyhow and never wore dinner
clothes there in your life! Necktie drawn too tight! Shirt bosom hard
and smooth instead of soft and pleated! Collar two seasons out of style!
Hair parted on one side instead of deftly and sophisticatedly in the
middle! Ears—look at your ears!—especially your left one! Ugh! It gives
me the creeps to look at it——”
“It’s an injury, Bernie. I can’t help that, can I?”
“Certainly you can help it! You got into the fight that made it that
way, didn’t you? And if I remember aright, it was over some of your
asinine poetry! But aside from getting into the fight in the first
place, surely you could have submitted to a surgical operation and had
it removed and put on right! And your hands! Look at your hands! Knotted
and gnarled in the knuckles——”
“If you’d had to do as much manual labor with your hands as I’ve had to
do with mine, your hands would be knotted and gnarled in the knuckles!”
“There you go! Hick again! Trying to defend yourself! Insulting a lady!”
“But aren’t you insulting me a trifle, Bernie, by calling attention to
the condition of my hands, which I can’t help?”
“No!” Bernie’s hysteria was growing a trifle wilder. “If a man is a
perfect gentleman—and perfectly bred—never mind what a lady says to him,
he concedes her the privilege of insulting him as her right—because she
is a lady! But what can you know about that, of course—coming from
Paris!”
“I don’t think a perfect lady would be cruel enough to remind a fellow
of things about his appearance he can’t help.”
“What do you know about perfect ladies? Where have you met any perfect
ladies? Who are you, that you presume to sit there and question my
knowledge of etiquette and what’s right and polite?”
Nathan gave a tired laugh. He drew a long breath,—that sigh of infinite
patience when called upon to hold his temper and indulge irascible,
inconsistent, spoiled womanhood.
“It’s true I haven’t had many social advantages, Bernie,” he conceded.
“But that’s never been because I didn’t hanker for them——”
“There you go! Hanker! That’s a nice word to use before a lady. Hanker!
I can see old man Fodder using it, while he spits foully on the floor
and wipes his dirty whiskers with the back of his hand. Hanker! Nathan,
you’ll leave me a nervous wreck!”
“What should I say?”
“Hunger is bad enough. Because you ‘never desired them’ would be better
and more refined.”
“Well, then, it’s never been because I’ve never desired them. But what
can a fellow do when his father——”
“That’s right! Blame your father! Blame your mother, blame your sister,
blame your town, blame every one and everything but yourself! In a
moment you’ll be blaming me! Do you remember the day after the
Sunday-school picnic when your father flogged you for going off alone
with me in the woods? Do you remember what I told you to do?”
“Yes!”
“What?”
“Get a gun and shoot him!”
“Precisely! Why didn’t you? Don’t you suppose that if you’d found a
shotgun and peppered his hide with holes, the big, hypocritical,
child-mauling bully wouldn’t have had a new respect for you and left you
alone?”
“But suppose I’d killed him?”
“Well, suppose you had? Wouldn’t it have been what he deserved?”
“But, Bernie! Be reasonable! You’re not advising a boy to get a gun and
commit murder? Where would I have ended? In the electric chair or on the
gallows.”
“They don’t hang children!”
“But do you think it would be pleasant to go through the rest of life
with the realization that I’d shot my own father?”
“If you were justified—as you were!—there would have been no remorse.
Besides, if you had been hounded by remorse, it just goes to show you’ve
got a clinging, messy, sentimental mind!”
Nathan had a feeling that he was talking to some one who was not quite
rational. Still, he was accustomed to dealing with irrational
people—especially, The Sex.
“I preferred not to do it,” he returned dully.
“Just so! And your father walked all over you, and took your earnings,
and imposed on you, and ground you down so that at twenty-one you flew
into the arms of that little Richards slut. And now you come yowling
around me for sympathy——”
“I haven’t—I’m not—‘yowling around you for sympathy.’”
“You needn’t think I haven’t any brains! You needn’t add that to your
boorish insults! You came here to-night, with your cheap peasant wife
dead and those silly love notes, thinking to stir up something of our
kid romance—ask me to marry you, perhaps. As if I would marry you—you!
Oh, my God, what an insult! I could call the police and have you ejected
for it, right this minute!”
“Oh, Bernie, please be reasonable! I haven’t asked you to marry me! I——”
“You don’t need to add falsehood to it all. If I’d marry you to-morrow,
you’d feel highly complimented, because there’s nothing in Paris to
equal me. Isn’t that so?”
Nathan hesitated to say “No,” and felt that “Yes” was falsehood.
“Answer me!”
“I hardly know, Bernie. I——”
But Bernie was obsessed with her own assumption.
“Well, I’ll have you know I’m done with men, do you understand? There’s
never been one yet that shot straight with me! Look in my eyes, Nathan
Forge! Do you see that stabbed look there?”
Nathan looked in her eyes. He saw no stabbed look. But he did see the
wild forked light and iris dilations of a rampant neurasthenic. And
moreover, if no males had ever shot straight with Bernie, Nathan had a
quiet hunch he knew the reason. But Bernie, of course, would have
exploded in one grand cataclysm of atomic energy if he had not agreed
that he did see a stabbed look in her eyes.
“Men have put that stabbed look there, Nathan Forge! Your sex! Even you
have had your part in doing it!”
“Me?” cried the amazed young man.
“You! You, you, you! That day off in the woods—remember it? You bet you
remember it! You tempted me to degrade my girlish modesty! You taught me
what fascination a woman’s body has upon——”
“Bernice! I——”
“Stop! Not a word! I guess I know! I’ve suffered enough for it! You and
your sex are rotten! Rotten! Rotten! And I’m done with it! And yet here
you come, sniveling around in your small-town boorishness and dinner
clothes, bringing me old love letters, thinking I’d marry you! And what
have you done that I should marry you? What are you in the world,
anyway—among real men, I mean? What goals have you won? What have you to
offer a woman——?”
“I hope I’ve got a reasonable amount of decency——”
The effect on Bernice was a shriek.
“Decency! Oh, my God, what conceit! You’re worse than some of those Los
Angeles picture actors I met last summer! ‘A reasonable amount of
decency!’ You! Who lived for six years in foul propinquity with a woman
you didn’t love——”
“I believed that sticking by my wife—when I’d given her a child—was the
right and proper thing to do. Men usually are sports that way.”
“More conceit! So you’re a sport, are you—along with being eligible to
an especial halo for decency? As if anything could offset sleeping—even
for one night!—with a woman who was not your ideal and your princess! It
just goes to show where your self-respect is! You haven’t any! You never
had any self-respect! If you’d had any self-respect you never would have
permitted your father to bamboozle you as he did! Oh, what a dirty
little cad you are! And you talk of decency!”
Nathan was beginning to lose his sense of proportion; he was getting
muddled trying to follow Bernie’s logic.
“All I’ve had to go by is experience, what I’ve been taught, what I’ve
contacted,” he blurted out. “If I did wrong it was because I didn’t know
any better!”
“And here I am, trying to show you wherein you’re wrong, like a sincere
friend, or a woman who loves you—and you sit there in all your
small-town boorishness and bigotry and conceit and try to defend
yourself! Faugh!”
Nathan, ever supersensitive, began to wonder how far Bernie was right
and how far wrong. And the woman’s continued tirade did nothing to
enlighten him:
“Hasn’t it dawned on you,” she cried, her voice strained with hysteria,
“why you’ve never gotten on in the world—why at twenty-seven you’re no
further along than you were at seventeen? I’ll tell you! It’s because
you’ve never been able to see yourself as others see you! You’re a boob!
A hick! A sentimental little small-town vulgarian. And I bet at table
you eat with your knife and blow your coffee in a saucer! No wonder you
haven’t got ahead. Hasn’t there ever been a time when opportunity opened
for you and then—when people you met saw you—that opportunity
mysteriously closed? Answer me! Hasn’t there?”
At once into poor Nathan’s distraught brain came the experience of the
New York knitting-mills management. His acknowledgment showed plainly on
his bewildered face.
“Ah! I thought so!” cried Bernie exultantly. “And why did you lose that
opportunity? Because you were a hick! Because you didn’t know how to
act! Because you probably deported yourself before fine-grained,
well-bred people the way you’ve been deporting yourself in my house
to-night—like a savage who pads around naked before his family and tears
his food apart with his fingers! That’s why you’ve never gotten ahead
and you never will! You’re small-town, I say! You’re rube and hick! A
vulgarian! And a rotter beside!”
Nathan stared blankly ahead of him. Was he? He almost began to think
that he was.
Bernie drew a long jagged sigh for breath, stared at him in
self-satisfaction, then arose abruptly and crossed the room to the steam
radiator. Bending down, she rattled the valve to turn it off. She came
back. Nathan was still in his daze. Hands on hips, a slurring sneer on
her features, Bernie paused before him contemptuously.
“Look at you!” she snapped. “Just as I say! Sit there and let a woman
turn off a steam radiator—never make a single move, or offer to do it
for her!”
Again Nathan was taken aback.
“You didn’t ask me,” he defended thickly.
“Ask you! Ask you! And has a woman to ask a man every time she wants a
thing done? I can see your father sticking out all over you! All her
life your mother had to ask him to get things done. A gentleman would
anticipate all a woman’s little whims and desires and please her before
she had to ask for them! And you!—you—want to marry me!”
Nathan was sick and getting sicker. More than sick, he felt bruised and
bleeding, somehow. Bernice had jabbed the lance of her spleen into his
most sensitive feelings of self-consciousness and handicap.
Were all women like this, even the best of them?
Again he had the feeling of holding out his hands to a woman and having
them slapped. Slapped? His hands? Bernie was cuffing his hands, his
mouth, his ears, belaboring him with blows from which he had no defense,
which he could not return because she was woman, The Sex.
“I guess I better go, Bernie,” he whispered huskily after a time.
“That’s right, you piker! Run! Just when you hear the naked truth about
yourself, run! It’s like you! It’s just like every man. It’s especially
like a Forge, and your father! I understand he didn’t stop running until
he got out of the country with a valise of other people’s money! And you
ask me to marry you—his son!”
“Bernie, I haven’t asked you to marry me! At least if I did, I wasn’t
conscious of it!”
“Then why are you here to see me?”
“To—to—talk over—old times—in Paris!”
“Fiddlesticks! Why should I want to talk over old times in Paris, when I
despise and detest the place—and all it stands for?”
“I didn’t know you despised and detested the place. How could I? The
trouble with you seems to be, Bernie, you want a man to anticipate
what’s in your mind, or think of what you’re thinking about, before you
even begin to think about it yourself——”
“Well, a brainy man would! Not being able to do it is another phase of
your provincialism—the deficiency and mediocrity that’s held you back so
that right now, sitting in that chair, you’re not a millionaire, a great
success in life, a big-leaguer socially——”
“I simply happened to be ’way off here, passing through Chicago——”
“‘Way off here! A long, long way from home, aren’t you? A long, long way
from Vermont and the General Store and the Village School and Uncle Josh
Weatherbee’s Farm? Faugh! Yes, I think you’d better go! And I’m going to
bed—and call a doctor. And if I’m ill as a result of this, your firm
will get my doctor’s bill, and don’t you forget it!”
V
Nathan walked back to The Morrison. It was still early evening. The wind
off the lake was delightfully welcome. As he walked he carried his hat
in his hand and let that night wind cool his hot forehead.
He had been shocked, shocked terribly. He felt as he had felt one night
back over the years when he had asked his mother about the origin of
infants and that mother had given him a terrifying delineation of the
everlasting fires of hell instead. The rapier point of Bernie’s
arraignment had cut through the armor of his philosophy, through his
very vitals and almost punctured the sac of self-faith which wrapped his
pulsing young soul.
He tried to analyze Bernie. She was irrational, a monomaniac, a
neurotic, the full and final flower of her mother’s infirmities. There
were ways in which Bernie was very like his own mother. Yet Bernie had
never been weighed down and had her individuality twisted and perverted
by the narrowness and mediocrity his mother had encountered. Bernie had
been “out in the world.” She had been academically educated. She had met
the world’s diverse types and temperaments. What, then, was wrong with
Bernie?
Frankly, he gave it up. It was beyond him. If he could have analyzed
Bernie he felt he could have analyzed himself. He decided that she was
simply a small-town girl even as he was a small-town boy, only he was
trying to put all his handicaps, vicissitudes and experiences to a
constructive purpose, so far as he had the light, and Bernie was not and
never had tried. There he had to let the matter rest, never realizing
how near the truth he had stumbled.
Yet in all this hectic analysis business, in all this vicious contact
with parental mediocrity, in all his heart-breaking experience with The
Sex as he had known The Sex thus far, the boy had never once grasped an
explanation as simple and obvious and plain as sunlight—and as common as
mud.
He had lived for twenty-seven years among people of half-developed or
deficient mentality. He had been surfeited with persons “who had no
brains.”
Looking upon the men and women he had known, especially the women, he
had observed that they possessed bodies, limbs, heads, faces. They moved
about, they talked, they ate, they slept. To all outward intents and
purposes, excepting perhaps for a certain vacancy across the eyes, they
were no different than the most profound philosophers who had ever
walked the earth. And because they possessed bodies, limbs, heads,
faces, because they moved about at their daily activities, talked, ate,
slept, he had subconsciously expected them to know all, see all, be all,
and impart to him a birthright heritage of mental and spiritual
nutrition for which his growing soul and spirit hungered. The nearest he
had ever approximated this was when he said of his mother, “She can’t
help it; she’s made that way.” It was not that his mother was “made that
way” so much as it was that she had not been made anything better or
finer or greater. And the same general hypothesis applied pretty well to
all those who had surrounded him. Mediocrity was only mental limitation.
It was not default of intelligence, as he had always assumed. It was
boundary. Beyond a certain point, God seemed to have ordained that
certain mortals should not pass.
Nathan had yet to learn that in the bodies of men and women,
individually and severally, never collectively and rarely racially, and
regardless of where they may discover themselves at birth, exist or do
not exist chromosomes—vital, literal cells—of character, high quality,
divine dissatisfaction, goal-winning discontent, beauty hunger,
atonement with Perfection, which is God. It seems as though God had
picked out certain persons throughout the human race, endowed them with
the divine Order of Merit, favored them with the Cosmic Urge to approach
Idealism. Those chromosomes might lie dormant through generations, to
appear suddenly virulent as they had appeared in my friend. And this
being a world in which like seeks like, Nathan was groping for
fellowship with other immortals in that divine Legion of Honor and thus
far had not found them and was miserable until at times he almost
doubted himself.
People of no brains! Mediocrity! Small-townism! Self-satisfaction!
Sordidness! Narrowness! Bigotry! Stagnation! Dross! Chaff! Nature
segregating her human waste! Nathan was not yet sufficiently enlightened
to sweep them all into the same great basket and discard them from his
scheme of things forever.
And this was the thing that bothered most: He knew instinctively that in
certain portions of her indictment, perhaps in its very fundamentals,
Bernie had been right. But where to go to overcome those deficiencies
she had excoriated, how to lift himself above them, perfect himself—who
was there to show him, give him his cue, point a way? He had assumed his
parents could do it. They had not done it. He had looked for Woman to do
it,—The Sex. But thus far The Sex had not done it. Whence was the light
and the help coming? For divine discontent with mediocrity and
sordidness was now rampant in his heart and could never be eradicated.
Fog! Fog! Fog!
Nathan finally turned into The Morrison. He passed through the crowded
lobby. Every woman he saw raised a feeling of repulsion in his breast.
In his heart was a blind impulse to smash and crush even the pretty
little elevator operator who made a laughing remark about a fussy old
man who wanted to alight on the fifth floor.
He reached the sanctuary of his own room and locked himself in. He threw
off hat and coat and lighted a cigar. He sank full length on the bed,
snapping the burned match angrily at the footboard.
He knew that culturally he was a provincial, a small-town “rube”, as
Bernie had called it. He didn’t want to be told those things. What he
wanted was to be shown how to correct his crudities and have them nursed
out of him, not blasted out with a torch; helped in his great moments of
self-doubt; he needed a knowing friend to face him in the right
direction, be patient with him when he stumbled, believe in him, have
confidence that he could win,—win with him!
There was no one,—yet!
Even his own philosophy as he had spoken it to Ted Thorne almost failed
him that night in Chicago. Bernie had been too cruel.
What was he groping for? What was this thing for which he hungered so
blindly? What was this “small-town” business, fundamentally? Why was
there such execration in being a provincial? Why did it bother him so?
Why the necessity for climbing out of it? When he had “climbed out of
it”, what then?
He thought of Paris, Vermont, as he lay there on the bed. He thought of
the view of Main Street from the Whitney House steps,—the same scene
which Madelaine Theddon had found so depressing two years before. What
was the matter with it? Why was it depressing? Why should it stand for
all the things he was trying to shake from his fingers like sticky
fly-paper? Was it lack of beauty in the place? No! Many parts of the
town were beautiful. And hundreds of great cities were filled with
sordid, depressing neighborhoods and quarters. It wasn’t a question of
size. It wasn’t a question of beauty. What then?
“Mediocrity, provincialism, small-townism,” he reasoned to himself, when
philosophy was beginning to win out and his hurt brain and consciousness
could function again. “It must be nothing more or less than the
embodiment of standing still! Backwaters of life, peopled by those who
fear the great, rugged currents, living to a standard and never daring
or attempting to raise that standard—seeing no reason why they should!
Lethargy—abiosis—existing from week to week, month to month, year to
year in the same fashion and speed and gait as the week, the month, the
year before. It’s the hideousness of standing all one’s life in one set
of tracks when something inside shrieks to go on, to move, to improve,
to be bigger, better, broader next year than last.”
He arose and walked to his room. He wished he had old Caleb to talk it
with.
“That must be what’s been the matter with me,” he argued to himself, as
the hours slipped on toward midnight. “I wanted something better at home
and father and mother couldn’t grasp it. I tried to get it in the
business and in so far as I got it the business prospered and there was
money and we approached some degree of happiness. I wanted to go on and
up with Milly and she couldn’t appreciate it. And I’ve subconsciously
hated everything and everyone about me because they gave me no approval
or supplied no incentive or showed understanding of that urge to create,
improve, Go Up. That hatred made for intoleration and I kept it
repressed inside me. I’m not a hick! I won’t admit it. Nobody can be a
hick so long as they’ve got the urge to go on up, to rise to better
things, better ways of living, better ways of understanding one’s
fellows, better ways of expressing the fine things of life in Art
ideas,—up, up—toward God waiting at the Top. Perfection at last. The
provincials are only those who hide in the backwaters, content to stay
in the backwaters, to remain in their tracks, to be satisfied with
little, inconsequential things, to see no reason for changing their
standards. And I’m not!”
Torn and mangled of spirit as he was that night, emaciated with the
great hunger of brain and heart for a birthright of sane, constructive,
inspiring, encouraging, understanding parenthood which had been denied
him, Nathan fought out his problem, step by step, for himself, and in
the recesses of his own soul looked for the way, the truth and the
light.
He would keep moving. To move meant enlightenment. It must mean
enlightenment. He would hew at his niche and accomplish his task though
a thousand millstones and anvils were loaded upon him. Somewhere were
High Hilltops, peopled with soft voices and calm eyes, manifestations of
elegant living because such was social efficiency—still another phase of
omnipotent perfection toward which he groped blindly—Art waves in which
the soul of him might bathe luxuriantly, somewhere were High Hill Tops.
There was no disgrace being born in the valley so long as he had no
choice in the matter and was consistently and sincerely hunting the
evasive pathway up to those Hill Tops—up to the Dwelling Places of
Light.
My friend had within him the gift of the Magi beyond rubies,—the great
galvanism of Divinity—energizing, vitalizing, driving his young Soul
Indomitable to cry from far up the heights “Excelsior!”—to battle
forever toward the stars. Yet he knew it not.
To Abaddon with cloying, handicapping, misunderstanding parenthood! With
fretting, abusive womanhood—with coarse environments—with petty twopenny
handicaps! He would go on,—doing his duty as he saw it, taking advantage
of the last iota of opportunities as they came, fighting as he
went,—true to the Aryan that was in him.
And after that night, he set his face to the west and he went on,
disregarding what the going cost him, little realizing that he was
suddenly carrying his High Aspiration written large on his fighting face
for the World and One Woman to see!
VI
Back in her apartment, Bernice picked up the packet of faded love notes,
untied the string with sneering amusement and selected a letter at
random. She read and the sneer disappeared.
She picked up another and read and the worldliness fell from her face.
She picked up a third, a fourth, a fifth. She did not read the sixth.
Face downward in the tapestry pillows, she sobbed out her heart.
------------------------------------------------------------------------