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.