The Forges left the Spring Street house and bought the old Longstreet residence on Vermont Avenue. Whereupon Mrs. Forge and Edith began to “put on style” and rise to the occasion generally. The womenfolk of a prominent manufacturer had to keep up appearances. Charge accounts were opened at the leading stores and for the first time in her mortal existence Mrs. Forge’s appetite for chocolate caramels was satiated,—the kind with nuts in them.
IV
Nathan was to become twenty-one on the second day of December. I knew, as his confidant, that the original plan was a wedding between Carol and himself on the ensuing Christmas. But as that late summer and autumn dragged along toward the first frosts, I grew increasingly worried. The cause of my perturbation was Carol’s correspondence.
The first letters, written in the initial pangs of separation, had come to hand twice a week,—or as often as Nat’s reply allowed. From September to the first week in November, no letter whatever came for Nat. Then an epistle arrived which the boy tore open and read with an avidity that was piteous. She had been ill. She would write at greater length when she felt better.
“I’d find an excuse to make a road trip, Bill, and go out and see her,” he told me. “But, hang it all, I can’t leave the factory. Dad would have things so snarled up when I got back I’d be six months getting the débris cleared away and things going smoothly again.”
Worry weighed the boy down. He grew increasingly irritable and somewhat surly. For hours at a time Johnathan would sit and figure. He would prove to Nathan that on some order made and shipped six months before they had lost two mills of a cent on every carton. Thereupon he declared that Nat’s obstreperousness was heading his father into bankruptcy. (Johnathan never spent hours figuring orders where the firm had cleaned up handsomely and absorbed the losses on lesser ventures.) He would arise in the middle of the night and go down to the shop—after the fires had been lighted in late October—to see if old Mike Hennessy, the watchman, was sleeping on the job. He caught him one night fortifying his courage with a short flat bottle and discharged him on the spot. The help came down next morning to find the fires out. It was noon before the plant was again up to standard. Father and son fought out the question of “hiring and firing” in front of the help—which is an extremely effective method for maintaining respect among employees for the principals in any business—and all this sapped Nat’s vitality.
“Thank God you’re twenty-one in a few weeks and my responsibility is ended!” the father swore as he paced the expansive dining room of the sepulchral Longstreet residence. His eyes were wild and his hair was rumpled. He walked with his hands in his pockets and occasionally grabbed up a book or magazine to hurl at his son whose retorts were always so apt, effective and unanswerable that Johnathan had to vent his feelings in action somehow.
Then the night when Nathan was twenty-one came,—the epochal date when he was free at last.
It was marked by two episodes. The quarrel over Edith and the newspaper clipping I was called upon to give my friend.
It was a Saturday night and Edith was taking part in a church concert on the morrow. She had left the house ostensibly to “practice her part” at the home of a friend. Instead of which she had met the Nelson boy and inquiry developed, quite accidentally, that she had “skipped off” to a dance in Wickford.