A stenographer had long ago been hired to ameliorate the time-consuming process of punching out correspondence with one finger on the old blind calligraph. Johnathan had a bell installed in a “private” office to push when he wanted this girl. He pushed it on an average of twice an hour. He wrote letters soliciting business from firms too far away to permit of freight rates leaving any profit. He answered advertisements for catalogs in the back of System Magazine and The Modern Factory. Of course important letters about supplies and shipments which Nathan had dictated hurriedly during noon hour, were sidetracked for these dictations by Johnathan. Wasn’t he president and treasurer?
Frequently, he made a “tour of inspection” through his factory, especially after the addition was built, the principal feature of these trips being to criticize methods which Nathan had instigated, pick up bits of cardboard and string from the floor on the contention that the only way to get rich is to watch the waste boxes, and left a long list of orders behind which were never executed, which the employees laughed at, and which Johnathan himself forgot within five minutes after returning to his swivel chair.
III
Of course, all this expansion and feverish industrial activity on Nathan’s part had but one basis: The day he was twenty-one he was going to marry Carol and he proposed to have a business sizable enough and profitable enough to clothe her in purple and fine linen and make her a Somebody because she was the wife of Nathan Forge.
The first month after Carol’s departure, and well along into the autumn, bulky epistles arrived for Nathan on an average of twice a week. Nathan had at once appealed to me to act as clearing house for this correspondence, and I therefore unwittingly kept a finger on the pulse of the courtship.
Johnathan, with small-bored shrewdness, had given orders at the local postoffice that all Nathan’s mail was to be saved and delivered to himself. And as no letters with Ohio postmarkings or addressed in feminine penmanship ever arrived in those following months, Jonathan knew the “affair” was over, and, praise the Almighty, “over” successfully. Carol’s letters came to me in a double envelope, with Nat’s name inside. When he wasn’t at Caleb Gridley’s in the evening, he was at my house using my desk and typewriter answering them.
Something of the old intimacy between Nat and myself was restored after Carol’s departure. I had meanwhile finished high school but been obliged to take a job in the local newspaper office. After work, or on Sundays, we fell into the habit of taking long walks about the town and countryside, while the boy raved to me of the undying affection in Carol’s letters or his increasing successes at the factory.
Carol, it appeared, had recovered her aplomb upon her return to A-higher. Her letters were full of minute accountings of her time and activities and how she was “getting her clothes ready” and what house in town Nathan should try to procure for their habitation, and what a boor and a bear Johnathan was, and what a trial and a nuisance he must be to the son generally.
And yet, through all of that twentieth year, and especially throughout the summer, there were days and nights when the boy’s loneliness almost crazed him.
Through the town he wandered, bareheaded beneath the stars. There was one ballad he and Carol had sung over and over until the lad knew the words from memory. Nat hummed the tune to himself on many starlit nights when he walked out toward the old lumber pile on the Gilberts Mills road: