“Bill! Bill!” my friend cried feverishly. “Tell me what it’s all for! Tell me why it’s happened to me like this! Tell me where I’ve erred! Tell me how it’s all to end! What’s the constructive meaning in it all, Bill,—and is there any constructive meaning?”
Tell him? How could I tell him? How could I make him see that his present predicament was as simple a dénouement of causes set in motion years back as it was natural for a field of waving corn to follow the dropping of potent yellow kernels in the spring.
Married to a cheap woman who “guessed he wouldn’t die” before she returned from a party where the chief item of interest was ice cream, lying in a slovenly claptrap of a home, excoriated by thoughtless local people, facing a court hearing and possible disgrace, laden with domestic obligations from which there was no escape in honor, as a man of his type conceives honor,—all harked back, I say, to the first day he had sought enlightenment about sex from the place he should have sought it, his mother, and been shocked instead into vicious repression. That childish “shocking” was an epilogue of all the sordid method of training him. For what? For exactly what Nathan was as he lay this night upon his bed.
The intolerable vileness and injustice of the whole miserable business lay in the fact that the father and mother responsible not only went scot-free from the penalty son and daughter must pay, but saw absolutely no blame for themselves in that dénouement. Blame for themselves? They actually believed themselves wronged.
Nathan rolled feverishly on his rumpled bed.
“Bill,” he rambled on wistfully, “remember the walks and talks we had when we were kids—the nights under the starlight—the boat rides down the river when I looked into the future and the world seemed so beautiful and wonderful, it hurt? I dreamed of a future then, Bill, in which I was affluent and successful—a wonder-time when all my dreams were coming true. And have a look, Bill! I’m loaded with the disgrace of the box-shop failure and half the poor people in town, it seems, weeping over their lost savings; married to a wife I don’t seem to get along with—with a baby that isn’t being brought up at all the way I’d like to see her brought up—paying the bills of a home where I can’t even get food cooked to eat nor a bed made to sleep on—less than a hundred dollars to my name——”
“I’ll loan you whatever money you need, Nat! How much——?”
“Oh, it isn’t that, Bill, it isn’t that! I dreamed of a wife who’d be a mate and a pal, Bill; one who’d be in a woman all that mother and the rest of the women I’ve known were not—who could work with me and play with me and laugh with me and love with me—and—and—I’ve gone to work and tied myself for life to a poor girl who writes her name like a seven-year-old and doesn’t know whether Bacon was a poet or something you buy for twelve cents a pound at the butcher’s and comes from a hog. I dreamed of a home, Bill—fine and rare and restful and rich, where all my treasures were to be gathered, where lights were seductive and every hour a golden moment—what was that line I quoted to you once, Bill—about ‘art drawing-rooms softly shaded at midnight?’ And look what I’ve got! Six rooms cluttered with junk, one step removed from squalor in a mud hut! This is my life, Bill, and I’m only twenty-six! They say America may get drawn into the war. Maybe—maybe—that’s going to be my way out. Only somehow, going to war in that spirit and leaving a foul nest behind seems weakness, Bill, not a whole lot different than putting the muzzle of a shotgun into my mouth and pulling the trigger with my foot!”
As I remained silent, he went on:
“Bill, remember the day I told you something about life being a fog—in which I groped blindly? Who’s responsible for that fog? Am I responsible, Bill—because I can’t find any way out?”