III
Yet one noontime in the October which followed, Nathan so deported himself in a certain pugilistic situation that the matter of broken pride was left open to reasonable doubt.
The boy had drawn apart to work upon a rime in a notebook. He found no recreation in sitting around the edge of the yard listening to cheap opinion, telling off-color stories, pitching horseshoes or flipping pennies. In a warm spot in the sunshine he worked upon a new poem which he had titled “Girl-Without-a-Name.” One Silas Plumb stole up and snatched the notebook from him. Worse and more mortifying, Si headed back for his fellow laborers. Noting that what he had snatched was poetry, he was seized with unholy glee. Disregarding Nathan’s cries of anger, Plumb leaped on a crate and dramatically began to “elocute”—
“Listen, fellers! This is rich! Poetry! Listen! ‘You came to me in my dreams last night, Dear Girl-Without-a-Name——”
Blind, unreasoning rage boiled upward through Nathan. Chagrin and indignation fired every nerve in the boy’s body to murderous retaliation. Plumb was a heavy-footed, rumple-clothed, corn-fed son of a typical Vermont small town. He was blue-eyed, shocky-headed, red-cheeked and three years Nathan’s senior. But to have the innermost privacies of his romantic soul ballyhooed for the bucolic ribaldry and bovine amusement of the tannery men was like maddening vitriol poured on Nat’s naked flesh. He lurched for the notebook and when Si held on, Nathan struck him the hardest smash in the face he had ever received in his life.
Si held his sickly grin for about ten seconds. Then it froze on his mouth. He spat out blood and teeth. Purple rage flooded his features.
“I’m goin’ to get you for that!” he swore.
He dropped off his coat, smeared his bloody mouth with the back of his big hand and fell into clumsy fighting posture. Loafers in the tannery came a-running. Nathan was pale but resolute. Silas struck him. Stung to fury, Nathan hit back twice. The epochal battle began. That battle was tannery talk for weeks, for months, for years.
“Si had the punch to push his dukes through the side of a plank fence,” a local enthusiast described it afterward. “But young Forge hit him three times and run around him twice while Si was makin’ up his mind where he’d hit once.”
Back and forth across the enclosure the two youths struggled, upsetting boxes, knocking down hides, tripping on yard refuse, falling backward into the circle of wildly applauding spectators. Great pile-driver blows the larger fellow smashed at his lighter opponent. Nathan’s counter-attack was swift and rapier-keen, taking the other by surprise, getting inside his defenses, smashing his nose, closing his eyes, lacerating his lips, but always lacking the bodily weight to strike the other down or finish him off with a knock-out.
There is something vitally fine and fair in an American crowd. It wants to see the under dog get the best of it. Nathan, because of his slenderness, was the under dog. Si sensed that the moral support of the tanners was not with him. He grew Germanically furious.
The moral support of his fellow workers meant little to Nathan, however. He had to finish Plumb or be finished himself. And those who, through that summer, had called Nat a mollycoddle because he was finer grained than themselves, were swift and fair in revising their opinion and giving the stripling all the credit his proven prowess deserved.
The two came together in clinches only to break away when one saw an opening for a telling blow. Twice they both went down. The battle each time turned into a wrestling match, with any sort of a “hold” permitted,—biting, eye-gouging and hair-tearing being eminently permissible so long as it brought results.
At a quarter to one the fight had started. Fifteen minutes later it was still going strong,—arms and faces of both combatants bleeding, shirts ripped to ribbons, lungs bursting. The employees paid no attention to the tannery whistle for the reason that no tannery whistle was blown. The engineer and fireman were enthusiastically howling in the front row of spectators. The absence of the whistle was responsible for bringing Caleb Gridley down into the yard. But the old war-horse of the local leather business was immediately too interested himself to interfere or start his factory. He stood with a fierce, hard joy in his eye, awaiting the finish.
That finish came at ten minutes after one. Silas, worsted but unconquered, picked up a piece of board and swung it terribly for Nathan’s head. A howl of protest arose, then approval as Nathan dodged. But Nathan had not dodged far enough nor soon enough. The board ripped his left ear from the side of his head. Silas followed in, raising one of his big boots to kick his opponent below the belt. By accident more than design, Nathan tripped him. As Silas went down, Nathan sent a left jab to his jaw. It rocked the roughneck’s head. He sagged, grinned, pitched downward on his forehead, and went peacefully off to hear little birds sing sweetly.
The fight was finished. Likewise both participants. For Nathan saw his man prostrate, took three steps and crumpled—senseless.
Old Caleb pushed forward. “Take the kid to the office,” he ordered curtly. Grim satisfaction lay on his paving-block jaw. “As for that low-brow, leave him lie busted. I stand for the man that fights fair!”
They carried the unconscious Nathan to tannery headquarters. Doctor Johnson was summoned by telephone. Nat was losing alarming quantities of blood from the ragged ear and more was trickling out between his teeth. First aid was administered, but it was a sickening business.
“That’s nasty bad,” Johnson commented as he tried to wash the wound. “It’s almost tore from his head—this ear!”
“Sew it back,” commanded Caleb.
“But he’ll bear the scar for life.”
“Can’t help that! Sew it back! Mustn’t have so gamey a little bantam goin’ through life with one ear missin’!”
Johnson phoned for Doctor Birch to help him. Birch brought a crude anesthetizing outfit. The ear was sewed at once to prevent the loss of more blood. The lad was as white as paper in his coma. The exertion of the past half-hour had been terrific. It showed grisly on his features.
Two o’clock arrived before the surgery was finished. Nat’s head was swathed in bandages which were reduced to ribbons in the boy’s thrashings, as he came out from under the anesthetic.
“Leave him here!” ordered Caleb. “He’s gotta stay here till he’s stronger.” Then as Nathan gradually quieted, he demanded of the yard boss: “What started that mix-up, anyhow?”
“Poetry!” said old Richards. “This!” And he proffered a torn and besmirched notebook.
“Poetry!” cried Caleb. “Lemme see!”
“He’s always moonin’ ’round, writin’ poetry,” volunteered Richards. “Si yanked it outer his hands and Nat waded into him. We always thought Nat was a mollycoddle, sort of, ‘count of his poetry and dandified talk. But I guess after this he can do as he pleases.”
Nathan’s weakened condition quickly induced sleep. It was night when he awoke. He was at home and his mother was bending above him.
“My poor, poor boy!” she crooned. And for the instant, groggy and faint with fiery pain as he was, a great up-welling tenderness toward his mother came in Nathan. When she kissed him, his arms went up around her frail shoulders and he clung to her.
But when he awoke the following morning all suggestions of tenderness were missing in the petulant, whining Job’s comfort she gave him.
“You’ve bloodied all my best sheets and pillow cases!” she cried; “besides getting your clothes all ripped and markin’ yourself for life! Oh, you do make it so hard for your dear, dear mother—so bitter, bitter hard!”
Nathan’s father came up during the noon hour and sat down beside the bed. Gravely he looked at his son and admiration lurked in his weak blue eyes.
“Well, I’m glad you’ve shown some starch at last,” he commented. “I’d begun to think I was raising a sissy.”
Thereupon, the seventeenth time for his son’s edification and future emulation, Johnathan launched good-humoredly into a recount of how he (Johnathan) had whipped the town bully at fifteen, against tremendous odds, a brick wall, and a pair of brass knuckles.
It was Johnathan’s way of being kind and showing his appreciation of what his boy had done. The reports about town of Nathan’s prowess had come to the father as sweet music.
Praise of his boy’s artistry, poetic talent and romantic temperament had touched only as the wind which bloweth where it listeth. But that his offspring had gone into a brute encounter, drawn blood, broken teeth, gouged eyes and torn hair—coming off victor though the struggle would mark him for life—was grand and noble and a cause for pride and satisfaction altogether. Johnathan felt that he, too, must not be found wanting.
So he finished off the town bully and then recounted various other deeds of a heroic nature in which he had also played the chief male lead.
Nathan had seen his father pale before the six-pound fist of Caleb Gridley. He had seen him shiver and quake inwardly when a neighbor announced that he would shoot Johnathan Forge on sight for having wrung the necks of the said neighbor’s chickens and tossed the dead birds over the fence in penalty for wandering into the Forge garden. And Nat wondered at just what point between boyhood and manhood his father had lost his bellicosity and proclivities toward the manly art of self-defense.
That is, he asked himself consciously. But in his heart he knew his father had never whipped any bullies or any one else. He was about as heroic as an old mop. The recount for emulation he was passing on to his boy was pure fabrication in which the end justified the means.
Besides, Nat had heard of these Roman holidays so many times that he could repeat them verbatim, even correct his embattled sire when multiple narration brought exaggeration, or the father went astray on minor detail. Nat turned over wearily, therefore, and went to sleep—in the center of a victory over the Foxboro selectmen in which “all hands had been ingloriously humbled and brought down to the dust”—meaning that the Foxboro selectmen had apologized and paid costs. Which they had not.
“And I used to tell that boy stories by the hour,” Johnathan averred in later years, “—all sorts of virile, manly stories. But he never cared a great deal for anything I said to him. The boy and I simply couldn’t hitch. He had his mother’s blood—he was a Farman through and through!”
Nathan came back to consciousness and realized his father was still by his side, demanding angrily, “Are you listening?” and that Caleb Gridley’s name was mentioned.
“He’s sent word he wants to see you as soon’s you’re fit—over to his office. And for your own sake, young man, let’s hope he doesn’t fire you for this mix-up!”
The father eventually went out and Nathan passed from dreams with his eyes closed to dreams with his eyes open, pondering.