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.