II
It was Saturday night and Nathan went up to the Gridley front door and rang the bell. The Duchess answered. The boy asked for her husband.
Old Caleb had been the only real father Nathan had ever known. Old Caleb had been the first to notice him, a poor young slave in an abattoir, the first to encourage him, to treat him kindly, to give credence and deference to the boy’s opinions, efforts and dreams. It had been old Caleb who had kept his spark of self-confidence alive and burning when time after time Johnathan tried to extinguish it. Old Caleb, let it be stated now, loved Nathan like a son. As for Nathan’s love of old Caleb, it stood for the lad’s entire faith in human nature. If old Caleb had ever betrayed his confidence the milk of human kindness in the lad might have turned to sour clabber.
“He’s in his study, on the second floor,” declared the Duchess grandly.
Nathan knew his way upstairs; he had been there before. The Duchess returned to a visitor in the side room as Nathan passed the portières.
The boy was closeted with old Caleb half the evening.
“No, bub, I wouldn’t quit your old man yet,” the tanner advised. “My advice to you is to mark your time. Always remember that the man who can deliver the goods is the man who rules! You’ve delivered the goods down to the box shop and so you’re the real ruler. All your old man needs is a lesson. You stay out for a week; pretend you’re sick if you want, then let him try to boss the gang. He’ll have you back—high, wide and handsome—with a valuable lesson learned in addition. At least let’s hope so.”
“He tried to get some money at the bank——” Nathan began.
“Sure! I know! I’m head o’ the discount committee. I turned down his loan. A man that can’t run his family no better than your dad’s run his can’t run no business—on bank money, anyhow. If he gets sick and quits, or there’s any way for you to have full charge o’ the business, come and see me, bub. But your dad’s exactly my idea o’ nothin’ to brag about, and the sooner he finds it out, the better!”
Tears came to Nathan’s eyes.
“I’m much obliged, Mr. Gridley,” he choked.
“That’s all right, bub. Come ’round some day and we’ll talk poetry. We was so kind of busy boomin’ the leather business just before your dad took you away that we almost forget poetry, didn’t we? But maybe we can ring in a day or two yet. Writin’ any more yourself?”
“I’ve been so interested in getting the shop running smoothly I haven’t had time.”
“Pshaw, now! Don’t you go lettin’ business get ye too hard! You’re a poet, young feller, and you got a talent that demands development.”
“I wish I could make dad see it.”
“He’s goin’ to see it one o’ these days. But I’m all-fired ’fraid—it’s goin’ to be too late!”
Nathan reluctantly withdrew and started downstairs. Caleb came after him in slippered feet, vest unbuttoned. This sort of thing always horrified his Duchess. If she could have had her way, the tanner would have spent his time at home in a dinner jacket.
At the foot of the stairs a young woman was being helped into her cloak. It was a bright red cloak, trimmed with gray lambskin. She had been the caller in the side room when Nathan went up.
“Know this girl, maybe?” asked Caleb of Nathan.
The boy colored.
“I’ve not had that pleasure,” he answered. He had heard the minister’s wife so rise to a similar situation and considered it neat.
“Introduce ’em, Clem,” suggested Caleb. His wife’s name was Clementina but Clem was plenty good enough for Caleb. She was far from being a Duchess to her husband.
The woman withered her husband with a glance of loathing, then forced a wooden smile.
“This is Mr. Nathan Forge,” she condescended. “Mr. Forge, Miss Carol Gardner.”
“Hello!” said Miss Carol Gardner. And she giggled.
Nathan bowed stiffly. He raised his hand, lowered it, raised it again, thrust it behind him.
“Mr. Forge has been engaged with my husband in the leather business,” the Duchess explained largely. Then to Nathan, “Miss Gardner has recently come from Ohio to visit her grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Archibald Cuttner.”
Nathan bowed stiffly again. It was characteristic of him, a habit he had acquired the last few years, to turn his mutilated ear away from those with whom he might be conversing. But his eyes had met the roguish, laughing face of the Gardner girl. And he had seen—enough. She was very easy to gaze upon.
“If you’re leavin’,” suggested Caleb to Miss Gardner, “Nat better hoof it along with you to see you don’t up-end on the ice. The walk is slippery to-night.”
The Duchess assumed a “this-is-what-I-have-to-endure” expression while Nathan tried to find his tongue. Referring to this girl’s risk of accident between the Forge residence and the business section as an up-ending was embarrassing to the ninth degree.
“If I’m going your way, I’d be glad to see you safe home,” the boy volunteered.
“Oh, that’s so sweet of you!” responded the girl. She found her gray lambskin muff, buried the lower part of her oval face in it, looked slantwise at Nathan and laughed that mischievous giggle again.
They went down the steps to the sidewalk. It was a stinging cold night. The sky was clear, deep sapphire. The full moon resembled a Japanese print, shining through bare, gaunt limbs of winter-creaking trees.
“I better take your arm, Miss Gardner,” the boy suggested. “You might fall down at that.”
“Grab hold!” the girl assented.
Nathan slid his hand in the warm aperture between her right sleeve and her soft body. His fingers closed about that plump arm delicately. The girl in red and gray, a head shorter than himself, pressed against him with the usual helplessness of the man-escorted female.
And at contact with her body thus—in that instant—he knew he had grown a man.
Miss Gardner slipped on the Pine Street walk, whether by accident or design is unknown. The thing that counted was that Nathan caught her in time and she did not resent it. In fact, she rather enjoyed it. She laughed gleefully and turned her small, snub-nosed face up to his, coyly and viciously close.
“I’m awfully clumsy,” she confided. She did not enlighten him whether she was equally clumsy when walking without an escort.
This opened conversational possibilities. Nathan averred that she was nothing of the sort. So they traversed two blocks, Miss Gardner insisting that she was clumsy and Nathan making it his portion of the argument that she was not. Anybody might slip on the old icy walks, as icy as they were around the little old town of Paris. They had a rotten old lot of selectmen—no sand or ashes on the walks or anything—so on toward Walnut Street.
“So you’re in the leather business with Mr. Gridley,” the girl observed.
“No! I was in the leather business with Mr. Gridley. Now I’m in the paper-box business with my father.”
Miss Gardner observed that it must be an awful interesting business. Nathan observed, Oh, he didn’t know; sometimes it was and then again, sometimes it wasn’t.
“And what position in the business do you occupy?” the girl asked next.
“Oh, I run the place,” Nathan told her with a careless gesture, as though running places was the most inconsequential and offhand job in the world; undoubtedly he could run places before breakfast or between meals or in his sleep. So Miss Gardner was left to infer.
“Very interesting!” the girl commented. “And how many employees have you in your factory?”
Nathan was suddenly ashamed of his factory, the size of it. Oh, to be able to describe it in hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands!
“Twenty-nine,” he said truthfully, with difficulty.
“I’m sure we’re going to be awful good friends,” remarked Miss Gardner quickly. “I’m so lonesome here, you know, a new place and all.” Being a stranger in a new place was hard, hard.
Nathan assured her he knew how she felt exactly. He would do his utmost to see that she was not lonely. He promised it. It really was his duty, as a resident and a matter of civic responsibility. Strangers must be graciously acclimated and made to feel at home. That was only ordinary hospitality.
“I’ve been living out in Ohio with my father,” said Miss Gardner. “But he married again and my stepmother was cruel to me. So I came east to stay with grandpa and grandma and enjoy life for a little time before I have to go back to it all again.” This sort of thing was also hard, hard.
Naturally, likewise as a resident and a taxpayer, Nathan was duly sympathetic. How could any one—male or female—be “cruel” to such a delicious little woman in red and gray? He tried to frame phrases appropriate to the sentiment but decided the time was not yet auspicious to give them utterance.
“You must come in,” declared the Gardner girl when they reached old Archie Cuttner’s house. “I’ll simply not take ‘No!’ I’m so deeply grateful to you for seeing me home so safely. Why!—I might have fallen and broken a limb!”
By her tone she made Nathan feel that he had done something akin to averting a national panic, or negotiating the peace of hemispheres. He went in.
Old Archibald Cuttner “had money”—at least enough to “let him potter ’round” after a lifetime of keeping the books in the Thorne Knitting Mills. He and his wife lived in the eastern half of a big double house at the far end of Walnut Street. Nathan had never met the Cuttners, but he felt agreeably—nay, graciously—disposed toward them. At least they were fellow Parisians in the responsibility of entertaining the stranger within the gates and they were also her relatives. He would cultivate the Cuttners. Why had it never occurred to him to do so before? Why, some day he might be intimately calling Old Archibald “Grandpop!” Stranger things had happened.
There was to be no cultivating of the Cuttners that night, however. Both had retired, leaving the oil center lamp burning and turned down low on the reading table.
Nathan followed the girl into the close, oil-scented sitting room furnished in mid-Victorian and with Larkin soap premiums. There was a horse-hair sofa, several chairs, hideous with handworked “tidies”, a sewing machine, a what-not, a mantel holding curios from the four corners of the earth—and Troy, N. Y.—and an upright piano of two-day installation.
“Do you sing, Mr. Forge?” asked this siren from Ohio.
Nathan countered by desiring to know if she played. And when she said a little, not much, Nathan affirmed he also sang a little, not much. And Miss Gardner “took his things” and hung them in the adjoining bedroom and came back into the sitting room, feeling of her belt in the back and primping and patting her hair. Likewise she produced a pair of tiny pince-nez spectacles and polished them with great care while Nathan kept his mutilated ear away from her and wished to high heaven he had given better attention lately to his nails.
Putting on the spectacles at last, Miss Gardner poked her lacy handkerchief away in her blouse and sank in an opposite chair. She remarked that it was fortunate Grandpa Cuttner had retired, because now they had the house all to themselves and Nathan agreed it was indeed fortunate Grandpa Cuttner had retired, because they had the house all to themselves, although what they were going to do with the house, now that they had it all to themselves, remained to be disclosed.
Seated beside the lamp, Nathan had his first satisfactory look at the girl who might possibly “be his consort and his comfort down all the future years.” Undoubtedly both would always look back to this night and cherish it as one of Life’s Great Moments! And to think he was living in it now—that very instant!
She was a well-built girl, rather small in stature, with soft chestnut hair and large hips. She had a kissable mouth and a slightly snubbed nose and pink, shell-like ears. Likewise she had a “You-don’t-dare” manner that was tantalizing. She pulled her heavy mohair skirt down quickly over her ankles as Nathan sat opposite her and thereby the boy appreciated she was very modest and chaste and altogether a worthy object for the bestowal of his connubial affections. He tried to imagine that she was his wife already, sitting so domestically beside the lamp, and came back to earth by realizing she held an open library book in her lap and had launched into a dissertation on the decline of current fiction.
Nathan clandestinely smoothed his hair, shot his cuffs, got his feet stored away under his chair with minimum display and agreed that there were no masters like the old masters. As for himself, give him Dickens. There was a certain style about Dickens. Then at the psychological moment he remarked contemptuously:
“I write a bit, myself!”
“You write! What?”
“Poetry!”
“No!”
“Oh, yes!”
“Why! how perfectly stunning!” It developed the Gardner girl was just wild about poetry. And had Nathan ever had anything published?
Nathan gave her a blasé smile such as Kipling might bestow on a high-school sophomore from Racine, Wisconsin. Certainly he had been published. No one could count themselves real writers or poets until they had been published. Did she happen to have a file of last year’s Telegraphs handy?
Unfortunately the Cuttners did not keep such a lexicon of local pabulum handy about the house. The Daily Telegraph served a more practical purpose each morning by kindling the Cuttner fire. But it really didn’t matter! Anybody in Paris could tell her who Nathan Forge was and what he had done. All she had to do was ask.
The Gardner girl was gratifyingly impressed. To think she had come to know a poet and never realized it!
Nathan drummed his fingers on the chair arm, tightened his tie, took his feet from storage long enough to tap a tattoo on the carpet, put them back hastily, hitched on his chair, remarked it was too bad the Cuttners had gone to bed, for that unfortunate retirement of course precluded any chance of music.
Miss Carol Gardner immediately assured him that Grandpa Cuttner loved music, even in his sleep, and she would go to the public library to-morrow and read everything Nathan had ever written. In a sort of daze at thus entertaining a celebrity unawares, Carol moved across and twirled the piano stool—no one ever saw a piano stool twirled to its proper height for extemporaneous performance anyhow—and——What could Nathan sing?
Nathan affected a great ennui as he left his chair, and they went through the sheet music and popular ballads of the day with their heads rather close together.
Did he know this and did she know that? It was hard finding selections with which both were familiar. But this was awful pretty and maybe he could catch the words. So Carol played the opening bars of “Come Take a Ride in My Airship,” which was just then going the rounds of the picture shows, Graphophones and street pianos.
Nathan hummed this initial experiment in melodious aviation and then declared he believed it too high for his voice. He had something more negotiable ready: “Everybody Works but Father.” The sentiment was rather silly, of course, but the tune was catchy.
Between a badly tuned piano and Nathan’s cold—which he had not realized he possessed until that moment—the symposium on parental aversion to physical exertion was duly delineated. By which time both conspirators in this nocturnal songfest had lost much of their self-consciousness and were “ready for most anything” in the way of lyric and harmony.
Of course it was only natural that ballads of a more sentimental and intimate persuasion should be acceptable by both. So down in the pile, which had recently come from A-higher, Nathan found more sober and touching offerings: “’Neath the Old Acorn Tree” was particularly appropriate, especially the last verse:
“Out in the golden west to-night I’m dreaming,
The moon shines o’er the mountains, clear and cold;
I’m going East where candle-lights are gleaming,
Again to wander through the scenes of old.
The old mill wheel seems silent, all is lonely,
No loving form is waiting there for me.
In fancy I can hear a dear voice calling:
‘Dear heart, I’m sleeping ‘neath the acorn tree.’”
“How sweet and beautifully sad!” affirmed Miss Gardner. “Death is always so sweet and sad, isn’t it, Mr. Forge? But then, not so sad as disappointed love. Have you ever been in love, Mr. Forge?”
“Yes,” responded Nathan thickly.
“Oh, how romantic! And did you suffer a great disappointment?”
“Oh, I lived through it,” returned the boy with a sad laugh.
“But what you really mean to say is that it left its scars on your soul. True love always does that, doesn’t it, Mr. Forge?”
Nathan began to feel that the temperature of the room was uncomfortably high.
“I guess I don’t know much about true love,” he returned. “To be frank, I’ve never run up against the real thing.”
“I understand perfectly. You’re waiting for some great overwhelming passion to come into your life and sweep you off your feet. There’s always an overwhelming passion in everybody’s life, isn’t there, Mr. Forge? How true! How true!”
Nathan had an uncomfortable hunch that the Gardner girl was talking drivel. So he put a new piece of music on the rack before her.
“Let’s play this,” he suggested in lieu of a lowered window.
They hollered through “The Good Old Summer-Time,” or at least Nathan did, and old man Cuttner in the next room—the same who liked music even in his sleep—arose on one elbow in the dark and swept his arm around the floor at the head of his bed in hope of locating a shoe which he could hurl at the door. Not finding any shoe, however, he slammed over angrily and jerked the bedclothes over his head, muttering something about brainless young cootes who didn’t have gray matter enough to let honest folks get a good night’s rest, and who in hell had Carrie picked up so quick before she’d been in town two days?
“And have you ever been in love?” asked Nathan amusedly, as he sought in the avalanche of melodious sentiment for more breaches of the Cuttner nocturnal peace.
Miss Gardner played the scale with one finger.
“Oh, there’s a dear-enough boy back in A-higher that loves me to distraction. I suppose I’ll marry him eventually. But I can’t quite decide whether I love him enough yet.”
The sheet-music titles fused before Nathan’s gaze and his stomach turned over.
“Has he asked you yet?” was Nathan’s quiet question. He hummed through the tune of the sheet upon his knees—“On the Hills of My Old New Hampshire Home”—as he asked it.
“Oh, yes!” (Long sigh!) “But there’s quite a story to it. Some day maybe I’ll tell it to you. I’d really like your advice as to what it’s best to do.”
Nathan felt himself extremely competent to give advice on what it was best for her to do. In fact, he rather knew in advance what the tenor of that advice would be, regardless of the detail of the predicament. Music rather lost its charm after that. Carol arose and walked across to the window. She stood looking out into the winter moonlight where the shade was but half-way drawn.
“A girl now ought to marry for love alone, hadn’t she?” was her question.
“Absolutely!” affirmed Nathan.
“Yes. I’ve always thought so! There isn’t anything greater in the world than love, is there?”
“No,” cried the boy grimly. “And if more people would only stop to realize it, this world would be a better place. Happier, anyhow!”
“It’s so good to get a fresh, virile, masculine viewpoint on so important a subject. Because it affects one’s life so vitally, doesn’t it?” sighed Carol.
“My God!” groaned Archibald Cuttner in his bedroom. Whereupon his wife curtly advised him that he was pulling the bedclothes all up at the bottom.
Carol went on:
“And we can’t see a problem in proper perspective when it’s up too close to our noses, now, can we?”
“Usually not,” agreed the boy.
“Do you know, Mr. Forge, I think we’re going to be awfully good friends. We understand each other so completely. And it’s such a relief for a girl to have a firm, true gentleman-friend to turn to—in such a vital matter as love and marriage.”
“I wish you could have read some of the stuff I’ve written,” observed Nathan. “You’d get my viewpoint exactly.”
“It must be very wonderful, Mr. Forge. You understand human nature so perfectly.”
Nathan thought it discreet to preserve a dignified silence, as befitted one competent to advise perplexed young women on such momentous subjects as love and marriage.
“I’m hungry!” declared the girl suddenly. “You wait here. I’ll see what I can rustle in the pantry.”
Nathan arranged the music in order and laid it away on the lower shelf of the what-not. He paced the room only to sink down into a rocker, hands thrust deep in his pockets.
So he had found the girl at last!
Vaguely he remembered a Biblical verse—“All things work together for good to those who love God.” He wondered just how much he loved God. His conscience pricked him a bit as he recollected his caustic comment upon the Almighty in the past. Somehow the Lord was magnanimously returning good for evil. Yes, he had treated God rather scurvily. And in return, the Almighty had sent him this great happiness! Henceforth Nathan would take his Sunday-morning presence at church more seriously.
Nat decided to apply himself at the factory with redoubled energy, beginning the ensuing Monday morning. What was a mere quarrel with his father over one cheap girl’s wages beside losing the financial chance to keep his wife-to-be in the style and luxury she deserved? What if the Richards girl did get a raw deal? Who was the Richards girl, anyhow? Nathan felt like offering her up on the industrial altar without a qualm,—in the same class with the A-higher Unknown.
Carol returned. She had a big fancy plate holding half a layer cake and a pitcher of milk.
“It’s all I could find,” she apologized. “But I’m hungry enough to eat a boiled owl.”
Nathan affirmed he likewise was sufficiently emaciated to assimilate boiled owl, but the cake would be a perfectly satisfactory substitute, seeing there was no boiled owl to be had at that hour. And so he was served to a generous helping of the cake and dropped jam on his pants and crumbs on the floor. Whereupon he was advised not to mind—What were a few crumbs on the floor?—and as for the jam on his pants, she would get him a damp rag and she did.
But when Miss Gardner affirmed that she had made the cake, Nathan ate with a new relish and the fastidiousness of an epicure.
So she was a cook! She could make cake as good as the sample under present mastication! What a girl! And what a wife! Nathan wondered if he hadn’t better get down on his knees that night and humbly say some regular prayers.
Of course she depreciated her ability as a cake-maker. This was merely a little old mess she had “thrown together.” Some night he must come to tea and she would show him what a real meal was like. Would he come to tea?
Oh, well, Nathan might. He applied himself rather diligently at the “office”, didn’t have much time for social nonsense. Still there were occasions when it was beneficial for a man’s head to forget business. Yes, possibly he might squeeze out a night and come to tea.
The cake being eaten and the milk consumed—so much so that Old Man Cuttner ate his porridge next morning milkless—and the hour being late, there was nothing for Nat to do but take his departure. Which he did—regretfully.
“I’m depending on you to help me with my problem, Mr. Forge,” was the last thing the girl whispered to him solemnly in the cold front hall.
“Depend upon it, I shall not fail you,” were Nathan’s magnanimous words, closing that wonderful evening. And he walked off with his head high in the air, manfully, masterfully, to skid badly on the ice by the gate and turn bottom up with his hat flattened beneath him. But the Cuttner front door had closed. His fiancee had not seen.
Therefore Nathan picked himself up painfully, knocked the dents from his hat, limped more carefully down the rest of the sidewalk and came back to the world.