V
The evening following Nathan’s release from custody, my mother met me as I entered our home, the hour about seven-thirty.
“Nathan’s ill,” she declared. “I met the Doctor’s wife at the missionary meeting this afternoon and she told me. He ate something last night that disagreed with him and had a bad case of acute indigestion along toward morning. But the Doctor says what really ails Nat is a general nervous breakdown and collapse. You’d better go over. If there’s anything I can do, let me know. I’ll keep your supper in the fireless cooker.”
I went to the Pine Street cottage.
Milly had always distrusted me. She said Nathan “carried tales” to me about herself and her folks. Therefore she was customarily surly when she admitted me.
I found Nathan in a side room, the place warmed by a stinking oil heater. He was lying on his stomach in a rumpled bed, his fevered face buried in his arms. He turned over when I entered. He smiled grimly. Milly stood at the door for an instant and then said—to Nathan:
“Guess you’ll live till I get back. I’m going down to mother’s. Ruth’s having a party and——”
“Yeah!” shrieked little Mary, “and they’re gonna have ice cream!”
So Mildred and the child slammed out of the house. I scooped an armful of miscellaneous clutter from a chair and swung it over to Nat’s bedside. But first I lowered the window and changed the air.
“I’m glad you’ve come, Bill,” he said huskily. “If it wasn’t for you and old Gridley, there’s times it seems I’d be almost ready to quit.”
“Buck up, old man,” I told him. “Nothing’s so bad that it can’t be worse.”
“Yes, I know! And God Almighty hates a quitter! But I’m so muddled and antagonized and shot to pieces physically that I’ve almost lost my grit to go on. I’ve lost it, Billy, because somehow I can’t see much incentive for going ahead.”
We talked then as men will talk. We were not choice as to metaphor or idiom. We discussed The Sex with relieving frankness; we did not refer to spades as long-handled agricultural implements used to turn over the sod to find fishworms or for the digging of graves.
“Bill! Bill!” my friend cried feverishly. “Tell me what it’s all for! Tell me why it’s happened to me like this! Tell me where I’ve erred! Tell me how it’s all to end! What’s the constructive meaning in it all, Bill,—and is there any constructive meaning?”
Tell him? How could I tell him? How could I make him see that his present predicament was as simple a dénouement of causes set in motion years back as it was natural for a field of waving corn to follow the dropping of potent yellow kernels in the spring.
Married to a cheap woman who “guessed he wouldn’t die” before she returned from a party where the chief item of interest was ice cream, lying in a slovenly claptrap of a home, excoriated by thoughtless local people, facing a court hearing and possible disgrace, laden with domestic obligations from which there was no escape in honor, as a man of his type conceives honor,—all harked back, I say, to the first day he had sought enlightenment about sex from the place he should have sought it, his mother, and been shocked instead into vicious repression. That childish “shocking” was an epilogue of all the sordid method of training him. For what? For exactly what Nathan was as he lay this night upon his bed.
The intolerable vileness and injustice of the whole miserable business lay in the fact that the father and mother responsible not only went scot-free from the penalty son and daughter must pay, but saw absolutely no blame for themselves in that dénouement. Blame for themselves? They actually believed themselves wronged.
Nathan rolled feverishly on his rumpled bed.
“Bill,” he rambled on wistfully, “remember the walks and talks we had when we were kids—the nights under the starlight—the boat rides down the river when I looked into the future and the world seemed so beautiful and wonderful, it hurt? I dreamed of a future then, Bill, in which I was affluent and successful—a wonder-time when all my dreams were coming true. And have a look, Bill! I’m loaded with the disgrace of the box-shop failure and half the poor people in town, it seems, weeping over their lost savings; married to a wife I don’t seem to get along with—with a baby that isn’t being brought up at all the way I’d like to see her brought up—paying the bills of a home where I can’t even get food cooked to eat nor a bed made to sleep on—less than a hundred dollars to my name——”
“I’ll loan you whatever money you need, Nat! How much——?”
“Oh, it isn’t that, Bill, it isn’t that! I dreamed of a wife who’d be a mate and a pal, Bill; one who’d be in a woman all that mother and the rest of the women I’ve known were not—who could work with me and play with me and laugh with me and love with me—and—and—I’ve gone to work and tied myself for life to a poor girl who writes her name like a seven-year-old and doesn’t know whether Bacon was a poet or something you buy for twelve cents a pound at the butcher’s and comes from a hog. I dreamed of a home, Bill—fine and rare and restful and rich, where all my treasures were to be gathered, where lights were seductive and every hour a golden moment—what was that line I quoted to you once, Bill—about ‘art drawing-rooms softly shaded at midnight?’ And look what I’ve got! Six rooms cluttered with junk, one step removed from squalor in a mud hut! This is my life, Bill, and I’m only twenty-six! They say America may get drawn into the war. Maybe—maybe—that’s going to be my way out. Only somehow, going to war in that spirit and leaving a foul nest behind seems weakness, Bill, not a whole lot different than putting the muzzle of a shotgun into my mouth and pulling the trigger with my foot!”
As I remained silent, he went on:
“Bill, remember the day I told you something about life being a fog—in which I groped blindly? Who’s responsible for that fog? Am I responsible, Bill—because I can’t find any way out?”
“No!” I cried wrathfully. “Your folks are responsible! Damn them bringing kids into the world and thinking they’ve done their whole duty by simply giving them food for their bodies and clothes for their backs! Damn the assumption that parents are under no obligation to supply as much protection and training for a child’s mind and spirit as the law demands shall be supplied to its body!”
“I’m groping, Bill! Groping, groping groping! Will I ever find my way out? I wonder? It’s too late now to damn father and mother. Poor souls, I’m just beginning to see now they didn’t know any better. And the hopeless part of my predicament is that now I’m the father of a child in turn—although somehow I can’t feel like a father!—and if I don’t play out my hand, the day’s coming when my child is going to turn around and execrate me as cordially as I feel like execrating my own folks to-night!”
“The trouble with you is, Nat—you’re too darned conscientious for your own good. You’ve got a great bump of moral responsibility and it fills the whole of the inside of you. What you lack is a good healthy selfishness that would make people—especially your own relatives—quit playing you for a sucker!”
“Easy enough to say, Bill. That’s what Caleb Gridley contended. But if I acquired such a selfishness, where would I start in to exercise it? Father? He’s gone! Mother? Lord! She’d run shrieking through Main Street and probably end up in an asylum. Besides, after all, she’s my mother! Milly? I’ve married her and burdened her with a child. She’s no different than she was when I married her. In so far as she’s been given the light, or had the training in turn from her parents, she’s doing the best she knows how. No, the trouble with me is, Bill, I’m cursed with the type of mind that unconsciously turns back to causes for every result. And when I analyze those causes, I can’t do anything that savors of injustice. I don’t think I’m pitying myself when I say that I’ve known so much injustice myself that I can’t find it in my heart to pass more along to others. Folks who have suffered are quicker to detect suffering, I suppose. They shrink from passing it along. I don’t know! Somehow I’ve learned to judge folks, not by their conscious acts or the results they get, so much as by their motives. But it’s got me in a devil of a mess, Bill. And I’m a poor hater—a rotten poor hater. There’s dad now, I don’t hate him half as much as I did a few years ago. I’m beginning to pity him—for his narrowness and weakness and the things he couldn’t understand.”
What can be done with a chap like that? I give it up. The predicament simply had to work itself out.
“John and Anna Forge are only types of lots o’ parents, William,” said Uncle Joe Fodder when I went to the old philosopher for counsel later that week. “Not all of ’em are so narrow and vicious as John and Anna. It isn’t always the girl question that gets ’em all het up so they raise Cain with their kids. But most parents is nuts over somethin’, and their kids has to take the backwash. And most growed folks don’t make theirselves much trouble forgettin’ their own kidhood or how they felt about life’s big problems while they too was growin’. But the worst sin they’re guilty of, William, is bringing kids into the world, raisin’ ’em to sixteen, eighteen or twenty-one, maybe—then turnin’ ’em loose to shift for theirselves and lettin’ the devil take the hindmost. Among all the animals, Man, the highest in development, is the only one that don’t take much trouble to show their young how to hunt a livin’ or dodge life’s traps. And more’s the pity! Why, even a woodchuck does better’n that!”
“Oh, well, Nat,” I said, as I finally arose to leave that night, “if the allotted span of human life is seventy years, as Holy Writ contends, and you’re only twenty-six now, you’ve got forty-four years ahead of you yet. And forty-four years can bring many changes, old man. Perhaps all this is only education and training for something finer and grander and sweeter than you’ve ever dreamed of yet. Only being down close to it and going through it right now to-night it’s rather hard to see it.”
“You really think so, Bill?” Nathan asked almost piteously.
“Who knows, Nat?”
“I’ve been studying my Bible a bit, Bill. I’m not ashamed to admit it. Not dad’s Bible—the Bible. Men in perplexity have been going to the Bible for a long, long time, Bill. And I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the words of the psalmist: ‘Whom the Lord loveth, He chasteneth.’ I’ve never forgotten how you and I prayed that poor little kid’s prayer that night in the alders after I’d tried to kiss Bernie Gridley. I’ve done a lot of praying, Bill—I mean to do more. I’ve wondered if it’s true, ‘Whom the Lord loveth, He chasteneth?’ Is that the reason I must grope for a time in a fog before finding a hill top where the sun’s shining gloriously—and Someone—is waiting for me to come up? I wonder if there is a God—if the world is anything but a little fleck of gravel, twirling off in space—if the hairs of our heads are not numbered—if the sparrows aren’t seen when they fall? I wonder, Bill, if the Almighty perhaps—does—love—me? And—that’s—the reason?”
My throat grew thick at the way he said it. Nathan on the bed blurred before me. There was nothing maudlin about it.