IV
Nathan was to become twenty-one on the second day of December. I knew, as his confidant, that the original plan was a wedding between Carol and himself on the ensuing Christmas. But as that late summer and autumn dragged along toward the first frosts, I grew increasingly worried. The cause of my perturbation was Carol’s correspondence.
The first letters, written in the initial pangs of separation, had come to hand twice a week,—or as often as Nat’s reply allowed. From September to the first week in November, no letter whatever came for Nat. Then an epistle arrived which the boy tore open and read with an avidity that was piteous. She had been ill. She would write at greater length when she felt better.
“I’d find an excuse to make a road trip, Bill, and go out and see her,” he told me. “But, hang it all, I can’t leave the factory. Dad would have things so snarled up when I got back I’d be six months getting the débris cleared away and things going smoothly again.”
Worry weighed the boy down. He grew increasingly irritable and somewhat surly. For hours at a time Johnathan would sit and figure. He would prove to Nathan that on some order made and shipped six months before they had lost two mills of a cent on every carton. Thereupon he declared that Nat’s obstreperousness was heading his father into bankruptcy. (Johnathan never spent hours figuring orders where the firm had cleaned up handsomely and absorbed the losses on lesser ventures.) He would arise in the middle of the night and go down to the shop—after the fires had been lighted in late October—to see if old Mike Hennessy, the watchman, was sleeping on the job. He caught him one night fortifying his courage with a short flat bottle and discharged him on the spot. The help came down next morning to find the fires out. It was noon before the plant was again up to standard. Father and son fought out the question of “hiring and firing” in front of the help—which is an extremely effective method for maintaining respect among employees for the principals in any business—and all this sapped Nat’s vitality.
“Thank God you’re twenty-one in a few weeks and my responsibility is ended!” the father swore as he paced the expansive dining room of the sepulchral Longstreet residence. His eyes were wild and his hair was rumpled. He walked with his hands in his pockets and occasionally grabbed up a book or magazine to hurl at his son whose retorts were always so apt, effective and unanswerable that Johnathan had to vent his feelings in action somehow.
Then the night when Nathan was twenty-one came,—the epochal date when he was free at last.
It was marked by two episodes. The quarrel over Edith and the newspaper clipping I was called upon to give my friend.
It was a Saturday night and Edith was taking part in a church concert on the morrow. She had left the house ostensibly to “practice her part” at the home of a friend. Instead of which she had met the Nelson boy and inquiry developed, quite accidentally, that she had “skipped off” to a dance in Wickford.
Nathan had taken his sister’s part. The boy, in the exaltation of his majority, had dropped an unfortunate remark:
“You’ll be just about as successful in thwarting Edie as you’ve been successful in thwarting me. You think you busted up my engagement to Carol, dad. But you didn’t. Carol went away simply to get her clothes ready. And you might as well know now as any time that I’m marrying her on Christmas day—in exactly three weeks!”
Johnathan had remained rather wild-eyed for a moment. Then he found his voice and started cursing. Not content with cursing, he waited until his son’s back was turned and then dealt him a blow in the shoulder which sent Nathan smashing against the table. He knocked off crockery with a crash and sent a coffee pot into the front of a near-by china closet.
Mrs. Forge came running, and as usual, joined in the altercation. Johnathan’s cursing included his wife. His wife turned livid at a particularly vile epithet and hurled a plate. Johnathan dodged the plate and it went neatly through a pane of heavy glass. Then Johnathan picked up a chair and threw it. It hit the dome above the dining table and dropped its glass in a shower, leaving the brass shell swaying ludicrously. Mrs. Forge shrieked and Johnathan bellowed.
On the night of the son’s majority a pleasant time was had by all!
Nathan was unhurt. He walked from the room, got his hat and coat. He passed out the front door and left his father and mother having their last quarrel,—while he was an occupant of their house. He came to me.
“Any mail, Bill?” he asked anxiously.
I was punching away at my typewriter in the sitting room. I recollect that I took a long moment to fill my pipe and relight it before I answered. But there was no way out—for me. I had been working, trying subconsciously to evolve a way to break the news to my friend gently.
“No, Nat,” I said at length. “There’s no mail come for you—directly. But mother gave me a newspaper when I came home—an Ohio paper, addressed to me.”
“A paper!” cried the boy. “What’s the big idea?”
There was no way out, indeed. The paper was lying on my desk. An item in the “Social and Personal” column was marked in red ink. I handed it across.
COLE-GARDNER
A pretty home wedding was solemnized at the residence of Mr. and Mrs. P. H. Gardner on Temple Street last evening, when Mr. Gardner’s daughter Carol was joined in matrimony to Mr. Blodgett Cole, son of Mr. and Mrs. Roger Cole of Union Place. The marriage was the outcome of a boy-and-girl romance begun in the graded schools of East Gilead, when ...
I don’t think my friend ever quite finished reading that item. The paper dropped through his fingers, through his knees, down with a sharp plop! to the carpet.
“Bill!” cried my friend hoarsely, “Bill!”
“Hard luck, Nat!” was all I could say. “But don’t you let it upset you. If she’s that kind of girl, she wasn’t worth waiting for in the first place.”