VI
Johnathan, on that night’s walk, however, had determined upon a maneuver and reached a great decision.
If he could not control his son by scoring his body with a harness tug for the good of his soul, he would employ tact and discretion. In order to save his son from a horrible life of poetry, he would get into some business, ostensibly of a manufacturing nature, which might grip his boy’s interest as his own, and set up an industrial counter-irritant to poetic pathology.
If Nathan hadn’t written that Pagan poem and set his father by the ears, Johnathan would never have gone into business and taken Nathan with him. And if he had not gone into business and taken Nathan with him, all the course of the boy’s life would have been changed.
Viewed from the perspective of the present, truly it was a happy stroke,—writing that Pagan poem.