II
Never did a boy change so completely or age so quickly as Nathan in the three years which followed. He was sick and broken the first two or three weeks at the sights he was compelled to witness and the smells which adhered to him like a plague wherever he moved. I tried to get him to come out on Sundays.
“I dunno, Bill,” he would answer, “I don’t seem to care much about fooling ’round. Seems as if I’m tired these days, tired all the while. I no more’n get home Saturday night than it’s Monday morning and I gotta go back to it all. Oh, Bill, it’ll kill me sure. You don’t know anything about it. It’s awful!”
The boy lost weight. He grew more and more listless—bitter, moody.
“I don’t care whether I live or die,” he wailed one day when I mentioned that after the Academy I was going on to college. “Sometimes I wish old ‘Cock-eye’ Richards’ knife would slip when he’s skinnin’ and take me right acrost the throat.”
The boy’s life suddenly became a hopeless, hideous slavery. The horror of his work lay in his imagination. A lad of coarser fiber would have become inured to the tannery. Nathan never became inured to it. Yet he stuck it through. There was no alternative.
Sunday afternoons he would wander over the hills, lie on his back beside some peaceful meadow brook and dream his dreams. He began taking a pad and pencil on these solitary excursions, or a book. He cared little for Old Cap Collier or King Brady or the other penny-dreadfuls which were then in their heyday. His choice was poetry, fairy tales, Shakespeare.
“What’s the use of reading that stuff?” he demanded contemptuously one day, after finishing a sample hair-curler I had shown him. “It’s all coarse and mechanical, and you know the villain’s going to die at the right minute, anyhow, and the hero win out and all live happily ever after. And if you know it in advance what’s the use of spending a whole day readin’ through it to find it out?” Then the boy pulled a volume of poems from beneath him, a book that Miss Cora Hastings had loaned him. He read me “Grey’s Elegy.”
I confess that, red-blooded, hob-raising kid that I was, the sweet melancholy of the lines, as Nathan read them, “got” me. Often I found myself watching my friend, at a loss to understand him.
The other day while searching among the compartments in an old wallet, I came upon a folded, time-yellowed sheet of foolscap on which some verses had once been penned in a youthful but symmetrical hand. It was a poem which Nathan composed back in those years before he had “found” himself. These are sample lines of what this sixteen-year-old was producing:
DAY DREAMS
“Somewhere over the miles, dear heart,
Off over a turquoise sea,
There’s a pleasant isle that is set apart
For your rendezvous with me.
There’ll be never a cloud in its skies, dear heart,
And the days will be always fair,
For free as the summer winds that blow
We will live in our Eden there,
Somewhere!
“There’ll be no more heartache to spoil our dreams,
There’ll be no more griefs to grieve,
We’ll wander down eons of golden years
Through the vales of Make-Believe.
And I’ll drink of your lips, your eyes, your arms,
Till I’m drunk with their beauty rare,
And you’ll nestle me down till my stupor goes,
On a bed of your glorious hair.
Somewhere!
“The wealth of the earth and the sun shall be ours,
We shall know neither pride nor shame
Nor ever grow weary of too much romance
Nor spoil our sweet isle with a name.
And no one shall find our rendezvous,
No world break the spell with its blare,
For that will be Heaven—just you and I,
With no one to part us or care.
Somewhere!”
I submit this poem for what it is worth. The meter undoubtedly might be improved. Yet it shows the way the lad’s mind was leaning, the romancer, the idealist, the colorist, the emotionalist, always.
Johnathan Forge viewed a certain change in his son with satisfaction.
“Thank God,” he cried, “I’ve broken that boy’s false pride at last. Now maybe he’ll get solid ground under his feet and amount to something.”