V
They went into the parlor and sat down in the dark. Nathan was first puzzled, then alarmed. As the time passed and his father sat silent, an ominous silhouette opposite in the dark, that alarm increased to panic. Finally Johnathan cleared his throat.
“I just met Caleb Gridley up the street a pace,” he announced. “We had a talk—him and me. We talked about you—and your poetry.”
“Mr. Gridley?”
“Yes, Mr. Gridley! You’ve been coming along, Nathaniel. You’ve been coming along so fast I’ve hardly noticed. But to-night you’ve had a thing printed in the paper that’s brought me to my senses. You’re getting too big to thrash. So I’ve concluded to talk with you, I say. It’s time we got this poetry business straight. I’m responsible to God for your soul and this poetry business brings home how much. How old are you, Nathan?”
“Seventeen,” the boy answered grimly.
“Yes, you’re seventeen. And at the wild, foolish age of seventeen you’re starting out to ruin your life precisely as I started out to ruin mine. And did! Only I started at twenty-one instead of bally seventeen.”
“Ruining my life? How am I ruining my life, by writing poetry?”
“No! By going contrary to your father’s best judgment for your welfare and future. By trying to do something and be something which your father doesn’t approve of. At twenty-one I was in the same position toward my father—I admit it! My father knew what was best for me; he was older and therefore wiser. He wanted me to be a business man—to set up a shop with him. But I had hazy, half-baked ideas that I wanted to be a minister. So I went contrary to my father’s advice and his wiser judgment.”
“You regretted wanting to be a minister?”
“No! I’ve regretted I presumed to know more than my father about what I was best fitted to do. And now my own boy has come along and stands exactly on the brink of the same horrible precipice. I’d have thanked my father if he’d broken my neck for my independence. I’m not going to do that to you. But I want to show you the hideous mistake you’re making. Nathaniel, I want to save you from frittering away your life being any such puerile, willy-nilly thing as a poet!”
“But I like being a writer! I could do something big!”
“Stop! I’m doing the talking! You like to write poems, yes. And some men like to drink whisky and smoke cigarettes. But this isn’t a world in which we can pamper ourselves in the things we like to do. It’s a world in which we’ve got to school ourselves in stiff self-discipline—do the things we don’t like to do. Always! The moment a boy or a man goes doing something he likes to do, he’s guilty of a weakness—of a sin!—and sin is displeasing in the sight of the Heavenly Father. The Bible says so!”
“But if I can’t write, what do you want I should do?”
“The Bible says, ‘By the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread,’ Genesis, third chapter, nineteenth verse. That means a man’s chief concern in this world is work, business. All other things come second to work, business. A man should first of all have a trade, succeed in a good business, make money. After he’s done these things, then perhaps he can waste a little time with foolishness like poetry. But to put the poetry nonsense first,—that’s the cart before the horse; that’s to court failure, poverty, all the hardships I’ve had to endure, wanting to be a minister before I knew my own mind—marrying your mother! And I’ve decided I don’t intend to see you do it. As you’re not old enough to make up your own mind yet, it’s my duty to make it up for you. But I want you to see why and how it’s done. Twenty years from to-night, on your bended knees, with tears in your eyes, you’ll kiss my hand and thank me—just as you’re going to thank me some day for keeping you from girls or setting you to work in the tannery—having that valuable experience in contacting with unpleasant things.”
“Pa!” cried the aghast boy. “You’re not going to say I can’t write any more poetry!”
“I’m going to say you can’t write any more poetry until you know your own mind. What you’ve written in to-night’s paper goes to show the injury an immature, undisciplined boy can do to himself and to those who love him—by not knowing his own mind. All over this town to-night sensible people are reading your poetry. They’re laughing at you and pitying you. But they’re damning me as your father for not keeping a guiding hand on you, training your thoughts and impulses into healthy, money-making channels. To-night in the House of God I hung my head in shame for the thing my son had done. Even a minister of the Gospel rebuked me before the Elders in the Temple. And that shame, your shame as well as mine, is almost greater than I can bear. It can’t be duplicated, young man. It’s got to stop before you do something far more sickening.”
“But, Pa! I like to write poetry! It comes so easy——”
“Who are you—little, inconsequential, immature Nathaniel Forge—that you should consider yourself capable or talented enough to go before the public with your silly little rhymes? What do you know about life and its responsibilities and penalties—merely living here in this quiet, sheltered, comfortable home with your dear father and mother and little sister? Hasn’t it yet dawned on your brazen little brain that all the great poets have been men of mature intellect and venerable years—Longfellow, Tennyson, Whittier—what were they but bent beneath the weight of time, with gray heads and flowing beards——?”
“Bryant wrote ‘Thanatopsis’ at eighteen!” flashed Nathan. “And it’s one of the biggest poems in the English language!”
“Don’t argue!” roared Johnathan, his temper rising. “‘Harken to my counsel and give heed to my understanding!’ I’m talking for your own best interest.”
“Hang it all, Pa, I don’t care about business! I don’t take to money-making at all!”
“Then all the more reason why you should be made to take to money-making—correct a weakness in your character. Making money, doing business, is fine and manly and virile. But is there anything fine and manly and virile about wasting your time on silly, obscene lines of rhymes—that start a whole town laughing at you and pointing the finger of scorn at your father? Answer me, sir! Answer me!”
“I don’t know what to answer. You cut all the solid ground out from under me. I thought I’d found something I could be a success in, if I did it long enough. But you throw me all up in the air. I don’t know what I want to be, or what I want to aim for, at all!”
“That’s God speaking to you, my boy—telling you you’re not old enough nor wise enough yet to decide such matters for yourself. That’s why boys are given fathers—to decide for them. The proper and commendable conduct for a boy is to be meek and docile and humble, to accept the dictates and judgments of those who are wiser and older. The Bible says, ‘Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth!’—Matthew, fifth chapter, fifth verse. All great men are meek men. They efface themselves. They harken to those more learned and venerable—not ram about the world trying to poke their half-digested opinions at people, especially at seventeen. And in poetry!”
“I suppose I should have been meek when Si Plumb made me the laughing-stock of the tannery crowd that day? Let him walk all over me. You said then you were glad I’d showed some starch——”
“Young man, we’ll not make this an argument! Standing up for your rights in a fist fight is a far different matter than trying to show you are somebody in print, before you’ve reached your majority. Besides, if you hadn’t been drooling around with poetry that day, you wouldn’t have got yourself into that fight in the first place!”
Nathan had difficulty in following his father’s logic excepting that Johnathan had decided he did not care to have his boy a poet,—at least at present. Tears welled in his eyes. He pillowed his head wearily on his arm.
“Hang it all, Pa! It seems as if Life’s getting to be nothing but a regular fog. I feel as if I were groping my way around in it—not being able to see much sun—bumping into all sorts of things—not knowing which way to go to get out, or reach any special place. I’m just blundering around and around and around and—oh, what’s the use?”
“All the more reason why you should listen to your loving father’s counsel. I’ve been through the mill of experience. I want to save you from going through it, too—making all my hideous, horrible mistakes.”
“But you haven’t made a success of your own life, Pa! Then how can you tell me what to do, when you haven’t been able to do it yourself?”
“Be careful, young man! No impudence! I’m older than you and therefore must know better.”
A long, strained silence followed. Finally came Nathan’s voice.
“Father!”
“Yes, my son?”
“I’m not going to do it!”
“You’re not going to do what?”
“Stop writing!”
Johnathan Forge could scarcely believe his ears. For a quarter moment he sat rigid, hardly seeming to breathe.
“What say? What say?” he gasped weakly.
“I’m not going to promise to stop writing poetry—nothing of the sort! I’ve got a hunch for it, if I am blundering around in a fog. But somewhere, sometime, I’ll find my way out. I know I’m not the kind of son you wish you’d had. Edith’s not the kind of daughter or mother isn’t the kind of wife, either. But I’m me and I’m going to keep trying. Nobody’s going to stop me—and——”
“You saucy young pup! You saucy young pup!”
“I’m not saucy! I’m honest. I’m giving you a fair, square answer——”
“I’ll flog you within an inch of your life!”
“Don’t do it, dad! It’ll only make things worse.”
There was a queer ring in the boy’s voice. Johnathan was so totally and completely taken aback he was weak all over. His own son!—in his own house!—openly defying him!—declaring bluntly and boldly that he, the father, was not to have perfect obedience in all things.
“My son, don’t have me call down the curse of God upon you! It will follow you all the days of your life.”
“You don’t have to call down anything, Pa. You’re trying to make me give up the only thing I know how to do and do well. You haven’t any right to do it. I know you haven’t. I feel it. I can write good enough to get published. So I’m going on. I don’t believe you know what’s good for me at all, or you wouldn’t ask it. Instead of helping me in the fog, you’re only making it worse.”
“You miserable, little——”
“I’m going to be twenty-one in just four years more. I’m going to boss my own life then. You can lick me now if you want. But if you do—for just wanting to keep on with the thing I can do best and easiest and like to do—I’ve pretty near made up my mind I’m going to run away—where you can’t find me till I’m twenty-one. And I’m never coming back.”
“God’s curses——”
“I don’t believe God curses any one, Pa. He’s too busy running the stars and suns and—heaven—to care whether I like poetry or you want me to be a business man.”
“And you’d—stand up to your father—like this——?”
“When I don’t think I’ve done any wrong, yes.”
“I’ll thrash you——”
“All right, Pa. Only to-morrow morning I won’t be here. You’ll never do it again.”
“I’ll have the law on you and fetch you back!”
“The law’ll never know where I am—to fetch me back.”
For the first time, Johnathan stood checkmate. That queer, hard ring in his incorrigible son’s voice told him subconsciously that he was close to the end of seventeen years of bullying.
Such a thing had never happened before. His wife had fought with him, indeed, but it had always been a “chewing match.” Though he had never struck her, the fact remained that he could strike her and beat her up thoroughly, if he chose. He had a feeling, however, that if he went beyond a certain point with Nathan, the devil had hold of his son’s soul just hard enough so that Johnathan might encounter the distressing predicament of not being able to come off victor. Nathan had whipped the Plumb fellow. The Plumb fellow was larger than Johnathan. In popular parlance, Johnathan was rather “up against it.”
The father did a strange thing. He arose abruptly, turned and walked from the room. Nathan heard him pass through the hall, out the front door, across the veranda and down the steps.
Why had he gone? Where was he headed? This silent, abrupt, unexplained, ominous departure unnerved the lad more than any commencement of fistic hostilities.
Johnathan Forge did not return that evening. All that night he walked the streets, debating whether he should call down God’s curses on his boy. He actually believed that if he did, the son’s life would be blasted forever. Morning came cold and gray and clammy across the eastern hills.
But in the morning the Forge household resumed the even tenor of its way. Only Johnathan did not speak to his son for four days and then only on matters of absolute necessity.
Nathan, however, had made a discovery. This is a world in which people suffer and endure exactly what they choose to suffer and not much more. When the worm turns, ninety per cent. of the early birds turn also.
As a discovery, it opened many prolific possibilities.