“No!” I cried wrathfully. “Your folks are responsible! Damn them bringing kids into the world and thinking they’ve done their whole duty by simply giving them food for their bodies and clothes for their backs! Damn the assumption that parents are under no obligation to supply as much protection and training for a child’s mind and spirit as the law demands shall be supplied to its body!”
“I’m groping, Bill! Groping, groping groping! Will I ever find my way out? I wonder? It’s too late now to damn father and mother. Poor souls, I’m just beginning to see now they didn’t know any better. And the hopeless part of my predicament is that now I’m the father of a child in turn—although somehow I can’t feel like a father!—and if I don’t play out my hand, the day’s coming when my child is going to turn around and execrate me as cordially as I feel like execrating my own folks to-night!”
“The trouble with you is, Nat—you’re too darned conscientious for your own good. You’ve got a great bump of moral responsibility and it fills the whole of the inside of you. What you lack is a good healthy selfishness that would make people—especially your own relatives—quit playing you for a sucker!”
“Easy enough to say, Bill. That’s what Caleb Gridley contended. But if I acquired such a selfishness, where would I start in to exercise it? Father? He’s gone! Mother? Lord! She’d run shrieking through Main Street and probably end up in an asylum. Besides, after all, she’s my mother! Milly? I’ve married her and burdened her with a child. She’s no different than she was when I married her. In so far as she’s been given the light, or had the training in turn from her parents, she’s doing the best she knows how. No, the trouble with me is, Bill, I’m cursed with the type of mind that unconsciously turns back to causes for every result. And when I analyze those causes, I can’t do anything that savors of injustice. I don’t think I’m pitying myself when I say that I’ve known so much injustice myself that I can’t find it in my heart to pass more along to others. Folks who have suffered are quicker to detect suffering, I suppose. They shrink from passing it along. I don’t know! Somehow I’ve learned to judge folks, not by their conscious acts or the results they get, so much as by their motives. But it’s got me in a devil of a mess, Bill. And I’m a poor hater—a rotten poor hater. There’s dad now, I don’t hate him half as much as I did a few years ago. I’m beginning to pity him—for his narrowness and weakness and the things he couldn’t understand.”
What can be done with a chap like that? I give it up. The predicament simply had to work itself out.
“John and Anna Forge are only types of lots o’ parents, William,” said Uncle Joe Fodder when I went to the old philosopher for counsel later that week. “Not all of ’em are so narrow and vicious as John and Anna. It isn’t always the girl question that gets ’em all het up so they raise Cain with their kids. But most parents is nuts over somethin’, and their kids has to take the backwash. And most growed folks don’t make theirselves much trouble forgettin’ their own kidhood or how they felt about life’s big problems while they too was growin’. But the worst sin they’re guilty of, William, is bringing kids into the world, raisin’ ’em to sixteen, eighteen or twenty-one, maybe—then turnin’ ’em loose to shift for theirselves and lettin’ the devil take the hindmost. Among all the animals, Man, the highest in development, is the only one that don’t take much trouble to show their young how to hunt a livin’ or dodge life’s traps. And more’s the pity! Why, even a woodchuck does better’n that!”
“Oh, well, Nat,” I said, as I finally arose to leave that night, “if the allotted span of human life is seventy years, as Holy Writ contends, and you’re only twenty-six now, you’ve got forty-four years ahead of you yet. And forty-four years can bring many changes, old man. Perhaps all this is only education and training for something finer and grander and sweeter than you’ve ever dreamed of yet. Only being down close to it and going through it right now to-night it’s rather hard to see it.”
“You really think so, Bill?” Nathan asked almost piteously.
“Who knows, Nat?”
“I’ve been studying my Bible a bit, Bill. I’m not ashamed to admit it. Not dad’s Bible—the Bible. Men in perplexity have been going to the Bible for a long, long time, Bill. And I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the words of the psalmist: ‘Whom the Lord loveth, He chasteneth.’ I’ve never forgotten how you and I prayed that poor little kid’s prayer that night in the alders after I’d tried to kiss Bernie Gridley. I’ve done a lot of praying, Bill—I mean to do more. I’ve wondered if it’s true, ‘Whom the Lord loveth, He chasteneth?’ Is that the reason I must grope for a time in a fog before finding a hill top where the sun’s shining gloriously—and Someone—is waiting for me to come up? I wonder if there is a God—if the world is anything but a little fleck of gravel, twirling off in space—if the hairs of our heads are not numbered—if the sparrows aren’t seen when they fall? I wonder, Bill, if the Almighty perhaps—does—love—me? And—that’s—the reason?”