“I heard him say it was a hell of a home,” Nathan told me afterward.
VI
Outside of parental incompatibility, the other bane of Nat’s life in those years was the manner in which his father compelled him to dress. A high-strung, sensitive lad, naturally fastidious, he could not have suffered a worse handicap in the matter of polish and poise in later years than resulted from Johnathan’s policy of dressing his family.
The boy was the butt of the school for his oddities of raiment. Johnathan’s idea of clothing was merely something to cover primeval nakedness. The first new suit the boy possessed he purchased with money he had made running errands. Invariably he wore coats and trousers cut down from those his father had discarded. This would not have been so bad if his mother had been any sort of tailoress. But she was slovenly with needle and scissors and the jests of his school companions were Chinese cruelty. “The Scarecrow” they called him.
Openly he was twitted that he was not invited to parties because of his freakish appearance. Johnathan Forge was small in stature and at seventeen Nathan was almost of a size with his father. After that the lad was compelled to wear Johnathan’s suits without remodeling. When Johnathan thus relegated a cast-off suit to his son, while he bought himself a new one, he made the boy pay something from his savings, whether he wanted to purchase the clothes or not. John’s philosophy was “making a man of Nat” and “teaching him to take care of his clothes because they cost money.” But it took years of hard, deliberate self-training to make Nat forego a painful self-consciousness of clothes and personal appearance.
Often in prayer meeting, which Nathan was forced to attend religiously after fourteen, as I listened to John Forge giving intimate details of the spiritual partnership between himself and the Savior, I heard Nathan snarl under his breath:
“Then I wish Jesus would put it into his head to get me a new pair o’ pants! I hope the Lord goes around lookin’ decent in His clothes but I doubt it or He’d have some pity on me!”
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.