III
How much he was in love with Carol only the heart of a nineteen-year-old could attest.
Having discovered how easy and simple it was to keep nocturnal trysts, Nathan began to show a sudden filial docility which pleased and puzzled Johnathan. The father soon realized that an entire fortnight had passed during which he had accounted for every moment of his son’s time—perfect alibis in every instance—and not once had Nathan seen or spoken to the girl. If Nathan had gone two weeks without her, of course he had taken his father’s counsel and given up the Sybarite forever. That was only logic. If the boy showed a strange and unaccountable drowsiness around three o’clock each afternoon, or if it became increasingly difficult to awaken him each morning at five-thirty, it was—according to his mother—because he was “working too hard to the shop.” To which Nathan amusedly subscribed. Because he had given heed to his father and yielded obedience without that threatened murder being necessary, Johnathan conceived the idea of letting the boy have a week’s vacation and take a little trip somewhere, say down to Nantasket. Nathan, however, failed to enthuse. With visible relief on Johnathan’s part, the vacation idea was swiftly dropped. The father did not cease from reminding the son of the former’s magnanimity, however, when later differences arose upon other matters.
The thing which troubled Nathan in those hectic days was Edith’s propensity to be allowed the same nocturnal privilege. It was quite all right for Nathan to spend his nights in the company of a reasonably pretty girl who was treated “cruelly” by her relatives. He was a man. But MacHenry shot too good a game of Kelly pool to make Nathan feel that a duplication of the stunt by his sister was advisable. His anxiety was ended one morning, however, when Edith fell over a chair in the outer hallway on her return, before her brother knew she had been out. The parents did not awaken but Nathan did. He leaped out to find Edith’s hair down and her clothing torn. One sleeve of her shirt waist was slit to ribbons and she was limping painfully.
“What’s happened, Edie; where you been?” the brother cried frightenedly.
“Oh, he tried to get too fresh!” was the sister’s rejoinder. She went to her room, destroyed the torn waist and slipped into bed. The MacHenry fellow disappeared from town next day. While Nat had never given his consent to Edith’s nocturnal absences nor abetted them, he was thankful his sister’s interest had waned.
For Nathan, however, no summer was ever quite like that summer. For spring passed and June came, and at least three times a week he left his room as soon as he heard his father’s heavy snoring to return in the moist, mystic hush of dawn—dawn broken only by the energetic chirping of countless song birds and the dull knocking rattle of distant milk wagons.
The news which Milly Richards had brought advised him that he was growing overbold, however. For two weeks thereafter, he and Carol took the Gilberts Mills road instead of going down to the box-shop, where the girl spent the night nestled in her lover’s arms.
So it was not this illicit tryst-keeping, finally wrecked by its own success, that caused Johnathan’s complacency to explode in his face. It was a letter that inadvertently fell from Nathan’s hip pocket one day in the mill and which Joe Partridge brought with a grin to Johnathan.
“Picked up some private correspondence,” he observed. “Guess it belongs to Nathan.”
Private correspondence? Nathan?
Johnathan took the bulky envelope addressed in a woman’s round hand to his son at the local postoffice,—General Delivery. He pulled out the sheets and the opening salutation struck him between the eyes like a brick.
Johnathan was limp all over when he had finished that effusive epistle. The father scarcely had the strength to rise from his chair. He found his hat and coat and went out into the August sunshine. He must think, think.
So they were keeping the asinine courtship alive by correspondence? Fool that he was, he might have suspected.
Yet John had read between the lines of the girl’s letter what was no thumb-nail sentiment between lovesick adolescents. The two addressed each other now as grown man and woman. Fortunately, no references had been made by Carol to their nocturnal rendezvous. Johnathan never knew—and does not appreciate to this day—toward the brink of what precipice he did all in his power to drive his boy. But he knew that Nathan had asked the girl to be his wife. She had accepted him. They were only waiting the saving of enough money on Nathan’s part and the making of enough “clothes” on Carol’s to perfect an elopement.
The father’s imagination and self-pity started on a rampage again. His temper began to growl. By six o’clock he was a roaring small-town lion, seeking whom he might devour,—principally something in the boy line under twenty-one.
Tact and discretion! Tact and discretion!
Johnathan knew he should employ them, that he must control his temper or another time he might break worse than his knuckles. Yet how could he save his son from this horribly yawning pit of premature matrimony? At last he had it! Archibald Cuttner!
It was true that Johnathan did not know Archibald Cuttner only as he sometimes thrust the collection plate in front of him on Sunday mornings, or had brought his Congress shoes to the Main Street shop for resoling—“in the old days”, as Johnathan already phrased it. But that did not deter him from going at once and laying his case before the girl’s grandparent in a great tumult of hysterical fatherhood.
The Cuttners were finishing the evening meal as Johnathan rang the bell. Old Archibald, a thin little man with queer, humped shoulders, came out with his napkin still tucked in his turkey neck.
They sat down in the porch chairs for a time and Johnathan handed the girl’s letter across and Archibald read it.
“God!” was Cuttner’s comment as he finished page after page of the “mush.” It disgusted him as much as it had angered Johnathan. It had been fifty years since Archibald had been nineteen and in love.
“S’pose we walk a pace,” he suggested. “I’d like to smoke. And we’ll talk.”
The two men left the house and while Cuttner puffed at a long black cheroot, Johnathan narrated his parental “troubles” from the first.
“Yer right, Forge,” the old man agreed. “Getting a boy past the ‘girl age’ is the hardest job a man can have shoved on to him—and the most thankless. Give ’em a free rein and the young asses go stick their heads in the trap o’ married care. Tighten the rein and it only makes ’em crazier to get at it. So what’s a man to do, anyhow? I’m beginning to think we don’t lay on the harness tug these days strong enough—to begin with—girls as well as boys.”
“That doesn’t save Nathaniel from this misalliance with your granddaughter now. What can we do?”
“What do you want I should do—at the girl end of it?”
“Couldn’t you send her back where she came from?”
“Back to A-higher? Yeah, I can send her back to A-higher? But what assurance you got this balky young colt won’t kick over the traces the minute she’s gone and start after her, dragging the whiffletree?”
“I’ll attend to that. You get the girl out of town. I’ll keep with him and watch him if I have to eat and sleep with him every night from now till the time he’s twenty-one.”
“Won’t be able to help yerself then, will yer?”
“But he’ll be a man grown, then, in the eyes of the law. He’ll know his own mind.”
“Ain’t far from it now, Forge. Nineteen, ain’t he?”
“But two years at this period makes all the difference in the world. Anyhow, if he deliberately goes wrong the moment he’s of age, my hands are clean. I’ll have done my duty in the eyes of the law and of God. After that, he’s got only himself to thank if he makes a foul bed and has to lie in it.”
So Johnathan found an unexpected ally in Archibald Cuttner. And the latter returned home to order Carol to “pack her traps and go back to her folks.”