III
The night Fred Babcock married them, there had been no place for Nathan to take his bride but the local hotel. He would not take her to his father’s home; he did not care to go to Milly’s. They had separated for an hour, each going for their “things”, pitifully meeting at the Whitney House later to set sail on the tempestuous seas of mismated connubiality.
Nathan had found his father pacing the same room, wild-eyed, wild-faced, wild-haired, hands thrust deep in trousers pockets. The room was in wreckage. His mother was in an adjacent apartment, eternally rocking, rocking, rocking, considering her troubles in the dark. Father and mother quickly forgot their differences, however, when they beheld Nathan coming down the front stairs, suitcase in either hand.
“Where you going?” demanded Johnathan sharply.
“To the hotel.”
“You’re going nowhere of the sort. Put those valises back upstairs. No story’ll go ’round this town if I can help it, that the very night my son turned twenty-one, he packed his traps and scooted.”
“Do you think I’m going to bring a wife into this?”
“Bring a what?”
“A wife!”
“Wait till you’ve got a wife before you talk about bringing her into anything. Put those suitcases back upstairs!”
“But I’ve got a wife. I married one at nine o’clock.”
In the darkened room Mrs. Forge’s rocker went over with a bump, she sprang from it so quickly. Johnathan reached out a hand and clutched the banisters.
“You married one at nine o’clock? Who have you married?”
“Mildred Richards. Good night!”
Nathan left his apoplectic parents standing side by side.
“Oh, my God!” groaned Johnathan. He staggered to the stairs and sat down flaccid, his face buried in his hands. He remained that way for half an hour.
Mrs. Forge walked slowly back into the wrecked dining room. She stood looking out one of the windows, with clenched fists pushed against her hips, face twitching, biting one corner of her upper lip so nervously it was difficult to discern which was twitch and which was bite.
After that first tragic half-hour, Mrs. Forge’s thinking amounted to this: Nathan had packed his clothes and gone to a wife and those clothes were not in a very happy state of laundering. She had put off her wash that week until she could get a new wringer. She still did her own washing. Laundries mangled clothes so.
It would be hectic to follow on into the week, the month, the year which followed, in so far as Nat’s marriage affected his father. A competent psychologist might have explained Johnathan, but explaining him would have availed Nathan little nor lightened his load. Johnathan’s ultimate attitude was:
He had preserved stainless the morals and directed successfully, though thanklessly, the spiritual education of his son for twenty-one wasted years. The lad had turned out incorrigible. That did not alter the fact that Johnathan had done his duty. His conscience was now clear. He had discharged his obligations to God and State. He was a free man.
The attainment of his majority and the acquisition of a “helpmeet” left Nathan to be treated as a man. And the chief incident in that treatment was a deliberate campaign soon started for a show-down to determine who was to be manager of that box-shop.
The effect on the business did not seem to occur to Johnathan. Or if he thought about it, he told himself the business was so large he could afford to lose occasionally for the sake of winning a principle.
Not once did the man realize or admit the rights of stockholders, or consider them on a par with himself in the matter of ownership. Stockholders were but a step raised above “help.” They had merely been privileged to share in a small portion of the company’s annual profits. Fiddlesticks with stockholders!
Nathan had kept the firm “right side up” and always progressing in the right direction. Johnathan had thereby gained the idea that businesses—at least manufacturing businesses—once established, ran themselves. By sheer force of organization! He now set out deliberately and maliciously to checkmate his son and retard him in every way he could conceive. The business was a bit beyond Johnathan’s grasp. So he decided upon a policy of “retrenchment.”
“Retrenchment” became his slogan and the motto on his ensign. Refusing to order necessary office and factory supplies was “retrenchment.” Turning down requests for quotations on new business on the ground that the company already had business enough was “retrenchment.” “Docking” a little flaxen-haired stenographer a half-day’s wages when she went home ill at three in the afternoon was “retrenchment.” Anything and everything that could discount Nathan, discredit his administration, get the employees dissatisfied with the boy’s management, curtail production so to show a loss which could be triumphantly charged to Nathan—all this was “retrenchment”—most commendable “retrenchment.” Nathan grew to abhor the word.
At such times as the father succeeded in his policy and the boy was humiliated and stopped, Johnathan waved his hand grandly and said: “You see! Some day you will grasp that your father is older and therefore must know better!” To beat Nathan and get his word doubted or his ability discounted among employees or stockholders pleased Johnathan more than declaring a twelve per cent dividend.
Nathan had flouted his father, deliberately plunged into matrimony in spite of all his father’s threats and admonitions. He had made his bed. Now let him lie in it. But in addition, Johnathan, as the mocked parent, intended to see that the bed was as hard, knotty and acanaceous as the father knew how to make it.
If Nathan didn’t like all this, let him quit. He, Johnathan, had managed to exist a considerable time before Nathan came into it; he guessed he could take care of himself and his business “for a while yet.”
But Nathan had made a discovery which comes ultimately to many organizers and builders,—that there is a point where the human creator may become slave to the thing created.
It was easy enough for people to declare wrathfully that Nathan should leave the box-shop and strike out for himself to teach John a lesson. They did their thinking superficially. Nathan had built that business under old Caleb’s coaching. He had a thousand details at his finger tips. Large numbers of humble folk had invested in the company’s stock, and there were the bank loans. The boy knew his father could not run the plant, that chaos and failure would follow swift and sure upon his retirement. And because of this knowledge, practical experience and large bump of moral responsibility, the boy believed he had obligations which he could not entirely sacrifice to self-interest. The business owned him. He must go on, not because of his father, but in spite of him. Perhaps Johnathan might be persuaded to drop out or dispose of his stock. Better still, he might die. Or the bankers and stockholders might some day learn the truth in a way that would not jeopardize the business. In that event, merit and loyalty must be rewarded. But nothing of the sort happened.
Johnathan had controlling stock in the company, and he saw to it that he kept controlling stock in the company. He would no more have considered making Nat a present of a block than he would have considered making the boy a present of his severed hand. He had worked hard for all he possessed, Johnathan had. His father had never helped him. Besides, Nathan had proven himself incorrigible. He had married against his father’s wishes. Therefore let him suffer the full penalty,—or get out and hustle and cultivate the acquisitive faculty for himself.
Anyhow, Nathan received no stock and he continued in the large capacity of General Superintendent. The most he could screw from the business was thirty dollars a week, and Johnathan constantly reminded him that this was far more than any boy of twenty-two had any title or right to expect. At twenty-two, he, Johnathan, had drawn only eight dollars a week; why on earth should Nathan receive more? Because he was married, with an establishment of his own? What a reason! Johnathan had wasted the best years of his life thwarting Nathan’s propensity toward just that dilemma. Why recognize and regard incorrigibility by turning over profits to a young upstart, even in the form of salary? Beside, he was committed to a policy of vigorous “retrenchment.”
This situation at the shop was something Mildred could never understand. She and her family had assumed that marrying Nathan meant marrying Millions. Both had believed that with the Monday following the nuptials, it was to be Milly’s delirious destiny to dip her red, paste-bedaubed fingers into the Forges’ golden pile and exist forever after in castles in Spain. The realization that she must keep her domestic budget inside of thirty weekly dollars came as a blunt shock. “Why, that’s only ten dollars more than father makes; it’s just like Ma’s had to do all her life!” cried the angry, astounded girl. Nevertheless, it was the truth, the brutal truth. And early she made Nathan feel that he had buncoed her.
Nathan’s subsequent estimate of Milly was no more satisfying. He had met her at the hotel that first night, convinced Pat Whitney they were properly married and been given one of the lower front rooms. It was Milly’s first contact with a real bathroom, and “a regular tub” as she expressed it. In fact, the whole experience for a time was not unlike a glorious entrance into marble halls of which all heroines daydreamed in the Elsie books. The two features of their apartment which most interested and impressed her were the globular receptacle on the washstand which, being inverted, spilled liquid soap, and the hemp rope with handles on it coiled on a hook beside a window for use in case of fire. She rather hoped there would be a fire. It might be interesting, going down that rope. Milly had heard that vaguely mystic phrase, “Hotel life.” She decided she liked “hotel life.” Everything was so convenient and “classy” and modern.
Nathan’s first disillusion came when the girl started boldly to disrobe and toss her clothing about on the chairs and the status of her undergarments was disclosed. There were many disillusions that night and the day and week ensuing. Milly had never before seen pyjamas at close range. “Gawd, Ma,” she confided awesomely next day, “he goes to sleep in white pants! You oughta see ’em!”
Nathan awoke first, the following morning,—that cold, much celebrated dawn commencing the “day afterward.” He looked upon the features of his still-sleeping wife as a man coming from metempsychosis. She wore a heavy flannel nightgown which had once been pink, buttoned to her throat with Chinese chastity. Her marcelled pompadour was shoved over one ear. Her mouth was open and several teeth needed immediate dental attention. A shudder ran through the boy. He was in bed with an utter stranger, with whom he had nothing in common,—a female of whom he knew little excepting that she had always lived on the edge of the “flats” with multitudinous brothers and sisters, and that her father skinned cows. And he had promised to love, honor and cherish her until death! He suddenly wanted to flee Milly, his parents, the business, Paris, everything,—in a panic.
Yet he could have forgiven his new wife many deficiencies, perhaps, if she had supplied that thing he had most expected: Sanctuary in her arms.
Milly had supplied no sanctuary in her arms. If Milly had arms, they were far from the purpose of solacing distraught masculinity. Milly’s arms were very necessary connections between her paste-bedaubed hands and her ample shoulders. Nothing more. What else did he expect them to be?
Nathan was shocked. She was a Woman, wasn’t she? He had made her his wife. She had said that she loved him and asked him if there were anything she could do to make him happy. What, then, was wrong?
A small-town Pygmalion waited for the conjugal Galatea he had created to be struck with divine fire and return his embrace gloriously. But divine fires, alas, rarely impregnate dough pans.
Nathan had made the sickening mistake that millions of poor youngsters make piteously every day,—that keeps divorce mills grinding to the horror of sanctimonious religionists: He had mistaken Sex for Ladyhood.
Instead of Milly inviting Nathan into Carmel, it was the man who descended to the girl as though she were a coarse-grained child.
Milly in propinquity with her suddenly acquired husband was the charwoman who had found a wounded demigod by the wayside and did not know what to do with him, nor exactly how to treat him, after his bruised hulk—Olympus ostracized—was hers for the taking.
Nathan and Milly, however, were married. In metempsychosis or no, the lad had assumed obligations he felt he could not retract. A home might solve the problem. So Nathan set about acquiring a home. With an eye to the limitations of thirty dollars, he rented the Mills cottage on Pine Street,—a six-room structure of poor sanitary equipment and no furnace. His first purchases were two stoves,—one set up in the kitchen, the other in the “sitting room.” Milly, her first shock of disillusion over, proceeded to make the best of a bad bargain.