III
The storm finally ended, the clouds parted, the thunder moved off muttering to the southwest. A radiant sun broke through. Bernice seated herself in its invigorating warmth. She removed the bedraggled ribbons and shook down her straw-colored hair. Barefooted and nude of limb still, she recovered her composure and began to make light of the incident. But Nathan was thoughtful.
“You act as if you were afraid of me,” Bernice cried petulantly.
The boy sat apart, beating a stick intermittently on the leaves.
“Aw, I ain’t afraid,” he laughed nervously, there being few things less pitiful than a boy striving to affect the sophistication he knows he lacks.
“Then what’s the matter with you? Have I done anything ‘specially wicked?”
“No! You ain’t done nothin’ wrong, I guess.”
But they stole forth, back down the woods road as Adam and Eve must have stolen from the Garden.
Just before they emerged into the clearing, Bernice turned. She clutched Nathan’s coat.
“Don’t you ever tell I took off my shoes and stockings!” she commanded. “Promise me! And don’t you dare break your promise!”
The boy agreed readily enough.
“And now, Nathan Forge,” she said, with a subtle glance around, “kiss me! Just once more. For the last time! A good one!”
But when the boy complied, his face burned. In the kiss he sensed no ecstasy.
He went out to the picnic grounds to run directly into the clutches of his father.
“Where have you been?” Johnathan demanded ominously. The whipcords of his neck stood out in anger.
“Nowhere,” whimpered Nathan. “Just over in the woods.”
“I’m told you’ve been missing all day.”
The boy’s face held the story.
“Have you been alone?”
“N-N-No!”
“Who’s been with you?”
“Billy!”
“And who else?”
The boy hesitated. It was hard to lie. But his little sister piped up shrilly:
“Bernie Gridley and Elinore Carver’s been with ’em! I seen ’em go!”
“Is this so?” demanded Johnathan.
“Yes,” confessed the boy boldly.
“You’ve been—off in the woods—with a girl—all day?”
“Yes, sir!”
“In spite of all that I’ve warned you?”
“Yes, sir!”
Johnathan reached out and lifted his terror-paralyzed son in his wrath.
“You march home!” he commanded. “We’ll see about this! What are you doing here at the picnic, anyhow, when I said you couldn’t come?”
“Ma said I could.”
“But what did I say to you?”
“You said—I couldn’t.”
“Then you deliberately disobeyed there, also?”
“But Ma said——”
“Never mind what your mother said. You don’t do what your mother says. You do what I say! March!”
The worst part of that whole picnic-day episode wasn’t the humiliation before all the boys and girls and particularly Bernie, nor the thrashing that followed. It was that his mother had promised immunity, to defend him, to “pay the piper” and did not keep her word.
Johnathan Forge got his boy home, took him out in the woodshed and ordered him to strip to his pelt. Before the flogging began, he prolonged the terror by coddling the weapon of assault—a couple of feet of stiff harness tug—talking to it, explaining to it how he had told his boy to stay away from the picnic and “his boy” had disobeyed; how he had been told to always keep away from girls and had disobeyed there also. Then he laid it on.
Sordid all this to recount? As well delineate Johnathan thrashing his boy around the calendar and be done with it. But it was a matter of principle with Johnathan. He was responsible for his boy’s soul to God. The Bible said so.
Whack! Whack! Whack!