III
Of course, all this expansion and feverish industrial activity on Nathan’s part had but one basis: The day he was twenty-one he was going to marry Carol and he proposed to have a business sizable enough and profitable enough to clothe her in purple and fine linen and make her a Somebody because she was the wife of Nathan Forge.
The first month after Carol’s departure, and well along into the autumn, bulky epistles arrived for Nathan on an average of twice a week. Nathan had at once appealed to me to act as clearing house for this correspondence, and I therefore unwittingly kept a finger on the pulse of the courtship.
Johnathan, with small-bored shrewdness, had given orders at the local postoffice that all Nathan’s mail was to be saved and delivered to himself. And as no letters with Ohio postmarkings or addressed in feminine penmanship ever arrived in those following months, Jonathan knew the “affair” was over, and, praise the Almighty, “over” successfully. Carol’s letters came to me in a double envelope, with Nat’s name inside. When he wasn’t at Caleb Gridley’s in the evening, he was at my house using my desk and typewriter answering them.
Something of the old intimacy between Nat and myself was restored after Carol’s departure. I had meanwhile finished high school but been obliged to take a job in the local newspaper office. After work, or on Sundays, we fell into the habit of taking long walks about the town and countryside, while the boy raved to me of the undying affection in Carol’s letters or his increasing successes at the factory.
Carol, it appeared, had recovered her aplomb upon her return to A-higher. Her letters were full of minute accountings of her time and activities and how she was “getting her clothes ready” and what house in town Nathan should try to procure for their habitation, and what a boor and a bear Johnathan was, and what a trial and a nuisance he must be to the son generally.
And yet, through all of that twentieth year, and especially throughout the summer, there were days and nights when the boy’s loneliness almost crazed him.
Through the town he wandered, bareheaded beneath the stars. There was one ballad he and Carol had sung over and over until the lad knew the words from memory. Nat hummed the tune to himself on many starlit nights when he walked out toward the old lumber pile on the Gilberts Mills road:
“I am writing to you, Molly, while the fair moon softly shines,
As it did the night before you went away;
When it shone in all its glory
And I told Love’s old, old story
And you promised you’d return and wed some day.”
It was a sickly, sentimental thing, being sung in all the picture shows and Wednesday-evening courting hours. But it was the second verse which probed the boy’s heart and always brought tears to his eyes:
“All alone I’m roaming, Molly,
Down the dear old village lane,
To the wildwood where we strolled with hearts so light;
In the old church they are singing,
Fondest memories it’s bringing
Of the girl I love, so far away, to-night.
Some folks laugh and call it folly
When I tell them you’re still true,
But you love me, don’t you, Molly?
Say you’re coming back, please do!”
The boy forgot all about his poetry, unless it was to try putting his loneliness and heart-hunger in words. Yet somehow he could not publish these. He filed them away with Carol’s letters. He lived, moved, had his being, in the box-shop.
Johnathan had been elected president and treasurer, Charley Newton who had left an office job at the process works to become the Forge bookkeeper (and learn how to thwart Johnathan making entries in his books and getting them awry), had been elected vice-president. Joe Partridge, who had arisen to the prominence of foreman, was clerk of the corporation, though Lawyer Bob Hentley did the secretarial work and all Joel had to do was sign on the dotted line. Nathan, not being of age, could not be an officer. His large capacity was “General Superintendent.”
As money flowed into the firm’s coffers, the prospects of the Forge family started looking up.
Johnathan began buying suits of clothes, evolved a propensity for bat neckties and learned to smoke cigars. He was less conscientious about his attendance at church and took long trips off “to keep the trade in line.” Invariably he found, however, that his son had contrived to do this by letter. When his “trade” began discussing deals and discounts of which Johnathan had never heard, it made him feel rather foolish and always angry. He returned grimly determined that he was going to run his own business or know the reason why. But before the first day was ended, he had become so engrossed in some new office contrivance or new set of forms, that he forgot larger problems,—or some quarrel with his boy sent him off to walk the streets for hours and pity himself. The matter of running his own business sagged until it was time for another venture at “keeping the trade in line.”
The Forges left the Spring Street house and bought the old Longstreet residence on Vermont Avenue. Whereupon Mrs. Forge and Edith began to “put on style” and rise to the occasion generally. The womenfolk of a prominent manufacturer had to keep up appearances. Charge accounts were opened at the leading stores and for the first time in her mortal existence Mrs. Forge’s appetite for chocolate caramels was satiated,—the kind with nuts in them.