VII
Outside of school, our lives were tied up intimately with the Methodist Church. We had no movies or theaters to speak of in those days, few sports, certainly no parties or dances,—at least for Nathan. The only party he ever attended, with parental sanction, up to the time of his majority, was little Bernice-Theresa’s of previous record and that largely because it fell within the scope of a school affair.
We went to church morning and evening on Sunday and to Junior League at four o’clock. We went to Tuesday-night class meeting and were scared nearly out of our wits at being called to stand up and testify how much we loved God when we didn’t know whether we loved Him or not. And on Thursday nights we sat through those long, distressing silences between testimonies when forty people waited for the spirit to move the brethren and lips whispered silently, committing sentiments to memory which were uttered parrot-like once the whisperers were on their feet. We knew before we started in who was going to pray the longest and for what he was going to pray; who was going to sing the loudest and what he was going to “call for” in the matter of hymns; who was going to testify the hardest and what his remarks were going to include. My only comment on these weekly spiritual gatherings, in so far as two growing boys were made to attend under pressure, was that they did us no lasting harm.
The red-letter days in our lives, however, were the Friday-night “sociables” and bean suppers, or the concerts given for Easter, Harvest and Christmas.
Absolutely forbidden company or contact with the other sex by narrow parental decree, the boy Nathan, being a normal, healthy youngster, had either to repress natural maturing emotions until they found outlet in clandestine, perverted channels, or he had to gain worldly knowledge and sex-poise by the hard, raw route of searing experience when John was no longer able to make his decree effective.
John Forge’s argument was that sex, as well as money, being a basic root of all human evil, the way to keep a boy from disaster was to prohibit him the company of sex altogether.
John Forge had married unhappily, therefore all marriages were unhappy. Nat should not duplicate his father’s mistake if John had to kill him to save him from it.
If Nathan attended any school or neighborhood gathering and his father heard of it afterward, the man had two questions ready for his son: (1) “Were there any girls present?” and (2) “Did you kiss ’em?”
John Forge had a crazed obsession about his boy kissing a girl.
In the school yard and even at church “sociables” we often played asinine childish games, “Ring Around the Rosy”, “Copenhagen” and “Drop the Pillow.” But Nathan, fearing his father’s wrath, was ever the wallflower. And he was deeply in love with Bernice-Theresa, or thought he was. Other boys kissed their “girls.” Why shouldn’t he?
“I’ve got to kiss her! I’ve just simply got to kiss her!” he consequently affirmed to me; no emperor ever planned the ravishing of a rival kingdom with the sangfroid with which Nathan deliberated upon the necessity for osculatory assault on the Dresden Doll.
“The thing to do,” I advised gravely, “is to get her alone where she can’t scream or bring help. And it’s got to be done in such a way that she don’t tell her folks! Because then they’ll tell your folks and your dad will just simply kill you!”
This might seem impossible, but to fourteen nothing is impossible.
We thought of intriguing Bernice into the woods at the edge of town, into the haunted dwelling next to the tannery, into all sorts of lonely, lugubrious places. But the difficulty lay in enticing her to the rendezvous and operating on her rosebud lips without scaring the Dresden Doll half out of her senses and bringing a boomerang back upon ourselves. Ultimately we resolved upon a bold maneuver: We would kiss Bernice Gridley in church!
“We could send her and Elinore a note,” I planned, “asking ’em to wait after the Easter concert. I could keep Elinore and send Bernie out into the vestibule. Just as she comes through the door you could grab her and do it! Then run like the devil!”
This was bold. It was terribly bold! Yet it was feasible. We had yet to learn that the ecstasy of osculation consists largely in the warmth and passion of reciprocity. We were midget cavemen, Nathan and I. Bernice-Theresa had to be kissed if our lives were forfeit.
I blush now when I consider the terms of endearment in which our letters of those days were penned. Hours we spent writing them. The most indiscreet scion of Pittsburgh aristocracy never committed himself more idiotically (to repent subsequently in curses and coin) than Nathan and I described our holiest, hottest feelings for the edification of those little snobs. So the intriguing epistles were indited and delivered. The kissing of Bernice-Theresa was on!
Nathan and I sensed little of that concert. We were too much occupied visioning the epochal thing to ensue as its aftermath.
The concert began, ran its course and ended. And the Dresden Doll never appeared more bewitching than she did upon that platform. Two small boys caught each other’s eyes and wiped perspiration from youthful brows. The fatal day and hour had come. Did we have the nerve to go through with it? Only the fear of each thinking the other cowardly held us from fleeing that church when the organist began the postlude.
It had been a beautiful spring afternoon and during the concert a thunderstorm played above the village. But later the sun broke through upon a sweet and dripping world, and the weather gave our elders no cause to tarry. The two girls, silly and giggling, held converse with other little girls up near the altar rail. They had signified by signs and semaphoring to which grown folk have no code-book, that they would wait and consider the momentous things we had to propound. And the church continued to empty and the janitor to close the windows.
Nathan and I stood waiting in the vestry. It was shadowed out there. I occupied a doorway at one side. I saw the two little girls finally coming down the center aisle, and made a sign to Nat. He nodded. His limbs were turning to tallow; he was hoping he would not faint at the peak of the conspiracy when nerve alone was required to see it through.
At the next to the last pew the two girls parted. Elinore sidled off between the seats to make her way to my door. Bernie kept on and stepped into the vestry.
The instant she appeared, all the pent-up intrigue of weeks galvanized in Nathan.
I am not certain where he kissed her, but at the shock of a small boy hurtling himself dramatically from the shadows, the Dresden Doll recoiled and shrieked and wilted.
Nathan exploded his kiss, trusting it to hit its mark. He sensed much talcum powder and cologne in his nostrils, contact with adolescent flesh, sweet and soft and warm. Then, at the instant of glorious success, the wrath of God broke from the heavens and consumed him as the fire that blasted Sodom. From the skies above, from the earth, from the waters beneath the earth, from somewhere came a Voice, a terrible, blasting, annihilating Voice:
“Here! Here! Here! What the devil’s comin’ off here, anyhow?”
Nat snapped up into the air. Then he assumed a Direction. Luckily the open church door was ahead. Into the soft spring dusk he shot and began to tread the world beneath him crazily. His not to reason why, his but to flee or die; Nathan cleared the doorstep into thin air and zoomed for the horizon. I was close behind him.
We negotiated the walk, the curb and the street. We made the opposite walk and kept on going. We went through Pat Larkin’s side yard and Mrs. Larkin’s choicest roses. A lot of sweet-pea vines came next, with most of them trailing behind us. Nat stepped on a cucumber frame and I plowed through a couple of yards of hen wire. Thereupon we got through the Alderman property into Adams Street. But we did not stop there.
We went through Adams Street, through Pine and Walnut. Then out of town by the pumping station. We covered two miles that night before we finally plunged into Bancroft’s Woods far down the river. There we crawled into the underbrush and squatted on our haunches.
Said Nathan, “Who was it?”
Said I, “It was Mr. Gridley!”
Sickening silence!
“Where’d he come from?” Nathan finally found strength to ask.
“He came down the belfry stairs! I remember now there was something the matter with the bell-rope this morning. He must have gone up with John Chase to fix it.”
“Her father!” groaned Nathan. “Billy—this is the end!”
“Not on your tintype it ain’t! It’s only the beginning!” I retorted.
“Billy—what are we going to do?”
So Guy Fawkes must have queried his lieutenants when the well-known Gunpowder Plot went slightly awry.
“I dunno, Nathan. It’s a cinch we can’t go home! We can’t ever go home again!”
“That’s right,” agreed Nathan. “Maybe Mr. Gridley is at my house right this minute, tellin’ it all to dad!”
“It looks, Nathan, as if we’d have to leave this place for good and all. Have you got any money?”
“Twenty cents,” said my friend, totaling his pockets.
“I’ve got a dollar-seventy in my bank at home, if I could sneak in and get it out.”
“That’d be a dollar-ninety. We could live a long time on a dollar-ninety.”
“Where’d we go?” I asked.
“West, I guess. Everybody goes west. Nap Taro went west and come back rich. Maybe down the future years, if we could come back rich, they’d forgive us.”
“But how’d we get there? It costs more’n a dollar-ninety to get west. And we gotta eat in the meantime.”
“We’d have to hop freight trains like the tramps. It’s a cinch we gotta get outa here or the police’ll catch us.”
“Oh, dear, I wisht we hadn’t done it!” I groaned.
“So do I,” lamented Nathan feverishly. “But it’s done now and can’t be undone.”
“That’s right. I don’t know as I ever heard of anybody unkissing a girl. And we won’t be able to grow up and marry Elinore and Bernie at all——”
“Maybe if we wrote a letter to ’em after we got west, they’d wait for us. Women do that sort of thing sometimes—till death.”
“But they’re probably mad at us by now.”
Nathan laid over on the rain-wet grass and hid his face in his hands. After a time he sat up and asked as men ask after drifting for weeks on an open sea:
“Billy, do you suppose it would do any good to pray?”
I considered this.
“Yes,” I said devoutly, relievedly; “let’s pray about it!”
“Who’ll pray, Billy, you or me? You pray!”
“No—you!” I argued. “You did the kissin’!”
“All right,” said Nathan brokenly. “But what’ll I say?”
“I’d ask God first to forgive the sin of it. Then I’d beseech Him to show us a way out—because we’re sorry—terribly sorry—and a way out is what we need most.”
Again Nathan considered, ashen-faced, biting his nails until the blood came. Then two distraught boys, hatless, their clothing bedaubed and briar-torn, facing the most hideous dilemma thus far in their lives, knelt in the shower-washed alders. Earnestly they besought aid from the giver of every good and perfect gift.
“Oh, God,” prayed Nathan, “we have sinned—we have sinned—against heaven and against Thee. Lord, we have kissed—we have kissed—no, I have kissed—a g-g-girl—and her father, Mr. Caleb M. Gridley, who runs the tannery here in Paris—he caught us!”
Nathan paused. He was very near sobbing. His voice broke several times in attempts to continue, striving to remember orthodox forms of divine supplication which might be appropriate for the present situation.
“He—he—he caught us, oh, God!” went on Nathan. “Oh, God, we beseech Thee—we beseech Thee—not to wreak Thy anger upon us, nor visit us with Thy displeasure—displeasure. Hear our prayers, we pray Thee—we pray Thee—and have compassion upon us—upon us. Mr. C. M. Gridley is mad at my father anyhow, over a suit for some leather that ain’t never been settled up, and now that he knows I’ve kissed his daughter, he’ll probably get action on collection. Mr. John H. Forge, my father, will wreck his displeasure on me, his son. Oh, God, we didn’t mean to do it, God,—that is, we meant to do it but didn’t mean to get caught. Therefore shield and protect us in Thy infinite mercy, oh, God, and turn not Thine ear from us—Thine ear from us. Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil; for Thine is the power and the glory forever. Amen!”
Nathan turned quickly, anxiously.
“Did I say enough?” he demanded. “I suppose I might have laid it on stronger.”
I held some such idea, but it was unethical and inappropriate now to return and reopen the prayer. I said God was assumed to know everything and inferred that undoubtedly He realized the exigency of the present circumstances anyhow.
“What’ll we do now?” Nathan next asked. “Had we better go west?”
“No,” I finally decided. “Let’s wait and see how the prayer takes hold. The Bible says ‘Knock and ye shall find; seek and it shall be opened unto you’. I say we trust Him.”
“You mean go home?”
“Well, we can sort of sneak up and see what’s happened. And if the prayer don’t do nothin’ then we can think about going west afterward.”
This possessed sound points and as the stars were coming out and the frogs were piping shrilly in the boglands, we arrived by back roads and streets at the Forge cottage.
“Pa and Ma are at it again!” groaned Nat in a sick whisper. “Probably old Gridley’s been here and told’ em. Listen!”
I heard epithets applied to a woman which made my mother’s face whiten when I suggested them at bedtime.
“Nat and I heard ’em through the kitchen window,” I declared. “We was lyin’ underneath it, listenin.”
“Well, sonny, don’t you ever remember those words or think of them again. They mean horrible, vile, foul, wicked things. That’s all I can tell you that you can understand—now!”
“But Nathan’s father said ’em!”
“Then Nathan’s father is a wicked man, even if he does get up in prayer meeting and tell how precious the Lord is to his soul. And did Nathan get into the house?”
“Yeah, he sneaked up to bed the front way. The door was open.”
“Well, you see, dear, your prayer was answered, wasn’t it?”
“It looks so, Ma!”
“Always remember it, laddie. You’re going to get in tighter situations than you got into to-night. Don’t ever be ashamed to pray, laddie. It never harms and always helps.”
“Do you think God really heard it, Ma?”
“Your prayer was answered, wasn’t it, laddie?”
“Yeah, Ma!”
“Then isn’t that answer enough? What more need mother say?”
It developed that Mr. Gridley had not recognized the identity of his daughter’s demonstrative friend. In fact, he had forgotten the incident within ten seconds after Nathan had taken unto himself wings and flown. He was far more interested in finding a short ladder to fix that bell-rope.
Thus for the first time in a great vicissitude Nathan and I learned that the worst enemy a man can have is often his own imagination.