CHAPTER VALWAYS JUSTIFIED
The Grand Hotel in Yokohama, Japan, is built close to the edge of Tokio Bay. Only the width of a macadam street separates it from a walled embankment with a twenty-foot drop down to the harbor water. It is a long, red building with a wide portico running the entire length of the eastern side. Tourists from the seven corners of the earth sit before the great, opened windows and gaze across the blue waters where outgoing liners are heading for home.
In a wicker lounging chair before one of those great windows at twilight of an August day in 1916 sat an oldish man with weak, watery eyes and a petulant mouth. He was dressed in white pongee, somewhat rumpled, and in his lap he toyed with a wide-brimmed Panama hat. His eyes were far away; he too was thinking of those liners, outward bound, heading for home. Home!
Johnathan Forge had never had a home. Or so he told himself. A house, a wife, children, expense, all these, yes! But a home, never! It was his wife’s fault. She had never been a home-maker from the beginning.
His thoughts turned backward this August afternoon back to America—New England—Vermont! He wondered about the people he had known so long and so intimately there. What had happened after he left them? How had they fared? What were they doing—now—this afternoon—this moment?
Johnathan Forge believed that life had given him a scurvy deal.
His father had made him work from earliest boyhood and he had turned over his wages to his parents until the day and the night he was twenty-one. That following year he had married—married Anna Farman. She hadclerked in the same store where Johnathan had been a sort of all-around handy man and shipping clerk. He had been very much in love with her, or thought he was. Yet almost from the first night he had discovered that between his mother and his wife a gulf existed as wide as China. His father’s life had been happy because his mother was a conscientious Christian woman. She knew how to keep her place.
His father had been absolute lord and Czar of the Forge family fortunes. No one ever presumed to question that such was not his right. His mother had never scoffed at St. Paul’s injunction anent wives submitting themselves unto their husbands as unto the law of God. Mrs. Forge, his mother, had taken note of St. Paul and rather approved of him, following his domestic admonitions without question. The result had been peace and happiness; at least there had never been any disgraceful quarreling or contention between wife and husband in the home of his father. The husband had laid down the law and the wife had obeyed. It was simple. Was he not the husband and father? Why shouldn’t she obey? Happy? What greater happiness could a woman desire than obeying her husband, submitting to him as unto the law of God? At least, when women did that sort of thing, domestic peace and connubial bliss resulted. Anna Farman had not done that sort of thing and showed she had not the least intent in the world of doing that sort of thing. She had married and then promptly declared she intended to preserve her own individuality and do as she pleased. It was plain therefore what chaos and misery ensued when any one—especially woman—flouted the decrees of the Almighty, His seers, His prophets and His saints.
Not only had Anna refused to obey her husband but she had early shown herself extravagant and impractical. At first she had wanted shoes, clothes, hats for every season of the year. Think of a woman with four hats! Or four pairs of shoes! Why, his own mother had worn one hat three years, done it cheerfully, thought nothing of it! Anna had quarreled with Johnathan over the subject of clothing so bitterly that the young husband might have left her the first year, if a baby had not been coming. After that he was in for it. There was no hope, no escape. Andfor twenty-five years he had endured it. Twenty-five years! A quarter-century! To think of it! What a fool he had been! What a fool!
A year of foreign travel—illicit though it might have been considered in certain obnoxious quarters—had changed Johnathan in many ways, however. For one thing, it had radically revised his ideas about God. The myriad millions of Asia, in their sordid, gnat-like existence, had caused him to wonder just how “personal” God really was. Anyhow, his conscience was clear about leaving home in so far as God was concerned.
In the first place, he had done his full duty by his children. He had given them a home, food for their growing bodies, clothes for their backs. He had made them attend divine services, he had kept their morals clean and their minds pure. It had been an awful ordeal to keep Nathan away from The Sex. Still he had managed it. That Nathan had promptly married at twenty-one had nothing to do with Johnathan. Johnathan had only been responsible for the boy until maturity. Not one moment after! The boy had become a man then. He had passed out of the father’s jurisdiction. If he had made a hard bed, let him lie in it, indeed. It only went to show he should have taken his loving father’s counsel to heart.
As for leaving his wife, they had nothing in common, with the children married. Why, then, should they live together? Beside, had he not left her in undisputed possession of a ten-thousand-dollar house? Let her sell that house if she so desired and live on the money. Ten thousand dollars should keep her the rest of her life. In fact, Johnathan flattered himself he had done rather handsomely by his wife. No cause for self-execration there! Then how about the box-shop? Ah, yes! The box-shop!
Well, it was this way: In the beginning he had saved eighteen hundred dollars of hard-earned money in spite of his wife’s spendthrift habits, and bought the box-shop. He had obligated himself for thirty-two hundred dollars more in notes. And, thank God, somehow he had paid them. But it had been with his own money, before he turned the factory over to the corporation and accepted stock.
He had been very clever in that transfer. He had takenthirteen thousand dollars’ worth of stock for the five thousand equity he had originally held in the business; well, it belonged to him. If he was cute on a trade, it was the other fellow’s fault if the other fellow didn’t watch out and found himself cheated. Then had come those hectic years when his boy’s ramifications had “grayed his hair.”
Johnathan never thought of them but what he grew angry, even in his exile. What he had suffered from that boy—his crazy ideas, his impertinence—his insolence, his refusal to “go into conference” with his father for the good of the business—his hot-headed, know-it-all, don’t-give-a-damn attitude toward the one in all the world who had done so much for him! How had the father ever “stuck them out”—those years? But he had stuck them out. And he had only left the whole miserable mess when it was self-evident that the unnatural son’s bigotry and business inability were going to pile his beautiful business on the rocks at last. That was only the first law of nature,—self-preservation. Even rats desert a sinking ship, and how much more sensible and intelligent should grown men show themselves than rats! Yet what had he taken from that business that was not due him? That was not his own? He had sold his five-thousand-dollar concern for thirteen thousand dollars. Very good! All he had withdrawn at the last was ten thousand dollars. Not a penny more; ten thousand dollars! Three thousand less than the value of his stock. And to show he had no criminal intent, he had duly made out and endorsed his certificates back to the company—back to the corporation’s treasurer—and left them on Nathan’s desk for transfer. Very good, then! He had simply decided he would rather have his money than the stock and made the swap. Nothing crooked about that! If he had carried away the certificates with him and the money—ah, then he would be a criminal in sight of God and man. But he had simply been shrewd. If his boy was so tarnation smart, let him sell the father’s stock to some one about the village and use the money to reimburse the company for what Johnathan had taken. That the “Board of Directors” had not sanctioned such a purchase from the treasury was nothing to Johnathan. Who were the “Board” but Nathan and Charley Newton and Peter Whipple of the Process Works and one or twoothers? They never would have understood Johnathan’s domestic position anyhow, or appreciated why he should want to leave home forever. How could they know the indignities and quarrels which had been his portion for twenty-five dreary years? What was the mere technicality of recording such a transfer on the books, anyway? If he had told them first, they would only have objected; and he would have had to hold a meeting and use his stock-control to club them into it. That would have aroused the banks and “pulled down the temple,” making the stock worthless.
No, Johnathan had only exercised ordinary Yankee shrewdness. And yet——
The great, bothersome, indefatigable fact remained that the banks and Paris investors would never see the deal in the light in which Johnathan saw it himself. He could not go home!
Not that he wanted to go home, of course. But still, he could not go home. And it bothered him.
Likewise there was the Carlysle woman. Great, fine, much-to-be-desired romance had come into Johnathan’s life at last.
And if he married her, still more emphatically than ever he could not go home. He would be guilty of bigamy, and the authorities in the States—who could never appreciate what a hard time Johnathan had endured through twenty-five hectic years—had very strict ideas about bigamy. And some day Mrs. Johnathan Forge,néeCarlysle, might want to go home. Then how could he explain? What could he do?
Johnathan sighed and sloughed down in his chair. After all these years, happiness was within his grasp and he could not grasp it. The world was very hard. Hard! Hard! Hard!
There were other crosses in it, after all, besides Nathan.
Nathan went up to the desk and the Yates Hotel in Syracuse and asked for his key and his mail.
He received a postcard from Milly—asking him to sendher money—a telephone and a gas bill which had been forwarded for payment, a letter from young Ted Thorne, his sales manager, and a long narrow envelope with a queer stamp. Nathan was puzzled by that stamp. It was a ten-sen stamp. What foreign country had sen among their coinage and who should be writing him from one of them?
He slit the envelope at the cigar counter while the clerk waited for him to select his smokes from a proffered handful. Then a queer, hard surprise smote him as he read:
Yokohama, Japan,
August 2, 1916.
Nathaniel Forge, Paris, Vt., U. S. A.
Dear Sir:
I write to you from a foreign land, afar from home, and an exile from all I hold most dear. My life almost wrecked by a brainless woman and thankless, unnatural children, here I sit in the forty-eighth year of my age, trying not to see the awful past, only to pierce the unknown future, and give you one last chance to redeem yourself and call down upon your head your father’s blessing.
You are perfectly aware, Nathaniel, of what my domestic life was, for twenty-five fearful years. You, grown now to man’s estate, realize that your father showed the mettle and stamina to endure blindly for conscience’ sake and from his sense of great, grim duty. If your rattle-brained marriage has turned out happily, you know what your devoted father missed. If it has turned out unhappily (for which you have no one to blame but yourself!) you are tasting the fruits of all the wormwood and aloes that was my potion since the first day I looked upon your baby face and hugged you to my bosom with a father’s pride.
In either case, you should be in a position to sympathize with me and at last pay your great debt to me by exerting yourself there at home in a trifling matter in my behalf.
Nathaniel, I may say I have broadened mentally in many things since leaving Paris and altered my views on many matters, principally the subject of divorce. Against my will, after all your mother has done, I am compelled to believe in divorce. Now that you children are grown and we have completely fulfilled our duties, responsibilities and offices as parents in every way, there is no longer need for your father and your mother to pull against one another and fight disgracefully till stark death closes down in the peace which passeth human understanding. Therefore, Nathaniel, as one who has reached man’s estate, Iwrite to you and make my last request. Then I shall give you my blessing, go my way and never trouble you again—only to remember you in my prayers. Nathaniel, I want you to help me get a divorce from your mother. Moreover, I want it at once. This much is not only my right but your duty. Never mind how the vast reaches of earthly distance may separate us, remember I am always the father who gave you birth.
I am not ashamed to write why I want a divorce. The fact is, an enforced exile in a foreign land, charged with a crime which was not a crime if my position could only be understood, I have met a lady who is all which your mother never has been, is not now and never can be. Beautiful of face and form, talented, poised, brainy and cultured, I would turn over a new page in life, redeem the past and live as God intended every man should live—normally, happily, at peace with his wife and the world. This is my right, I say. This phase of it you have no license to question.
So I desire you to engineer a divorce at once. The grounds of course, would be incompatibility. Your mother must not know of this—that I wish it—or she will show her inherent meanness and cheapness at once and oppose it simply because I desire it. You alone have influence with her. And I am not unprepared to make it worth your while.
The lady I want to make myrealwife is very wealthy. She is a widow living with her father who is in trade out here. I met her coming across nine months ago and for the first time in my life the cup of happiness is held to my lips. It remains to be seen whether the son for whom I sacrificed twenty-five of the best years of my life will dash it away.
The day you forward me a copy of the court’s decree, assuring me I am a free man, I solemnly promise to pay you one thousand dollars and no questions asked. Of course all this, including my present whereabouts, is strictly confidential.
I await your reply with interest. In fact, I think I should like you to cable me an answer—that you are working on the case, that within the year I may be free. Free! Free! Free!
Your hideously wronged father,
Jonathan H. Forge.
Nathan crossed to one of the lobby chairs and sat down. He lighted one of his cigars absently. Once or twice he smiled bitterly. Then he picked up the several sheets covered on both sides with his father’s weak, pothook penmanship and read them again. When his cigar had been smoked to the end, he went upstairs to the writing room, laid aside hat and raincoat, lighted a fresh cigar and at twenty minutesto nine o’clock started his reply. It was ten minutes after one when he signed his name.
For the first time in his life, Nathan unleashed his righteous wrath and told his father what he thought of him. For the first time, devoid of religious fetish or mawkish “respect”, the son drew forth the whips of his scorn and laid them without stint on his father’s naked back. He had nothing to lose which he cared for, and nothing to gain that he desired. With a maturing understanding, a cold brain and a righteous anger, he gave his father to understand in no uncertain terms what he thought of his “twenty-five years of sacrifice” and his “right to happiness”—with a strange woman.
“I am not interested in the lady,” he concluded; “not because you want to shelve mother and take up with another woman but the method you essay—a rather contemptible method from my standpoint—to go about it. God was mighty real to you and a hard taskmaster when Edith and I were growing, reaching out and demanding that nature be answered with the most natural and normal things of life. Apparently He’s taking a vacation when you arrive at the place where you want them yourself. I’m not calling you a hypocrite. If I could, that would explain much. But I am saying that I’m not made of the stuff to take money for freeing my father from my mother, that my father may gratify his own happiness while mother trims hats in a small-town millinery for a handful of dollars a week. In fact, if it wasn’t coarse, I’d feel like telling you to take your self-pity, your twisted outlook on life, your belated love affair and go to the devil. That’s crude. But it would express the state of my feelings with neatness, conciseness and dispatch.”
Nathan read over the packet of pages he had produced. Then he jogged them with ink-daubed fingers and folded them into an envelope. With a consciousness of good work well executed, he stored the addressed envelope away in his pocket and went back downstairs.
He went out into the city and down Salina Street. He found the all-night Western Union office open.
He despatched a cable to his father—four words.
“Letter received. Not interested.”
He went back to his hotel, ripped his evening’s work to shreds and dropped them in his waste basket.
Nathan was at home a month later when another letter arrived from Japan. Milly was down to her mother’s and he was dining from a corner of the kitchen table when the bell rang and the postman handed it in. Nathan read it while finishing his lunch.
Tokio, Japan, Sept. 10, 1916.
Nathan Forge, Paris, Vt.
Dear Sir:—
Your cable has reached me, saying you got my letter giving you your last chance to do the square thing by your father and repay him for all he has done and suffered for you—and you are not interested.
I might have known. You are that kind of a son. I am done with you—done, done, done!
Carefully through my things I have searched and culled out all that pertains to you; every reminder of you. Out of my heart and my life I am blotting you. Henceforth my son is dead. I never had a son.
Certain things which I have carried in my wallet, I am returning herewith. Cherish them! Save them for the dark hours, the melancholy twilights, the haunting midnights. Sleep with them beneath your pillow and take them out in dreams and say: I am cursed by my father! I am a son outside the pale! I have desecrated God. I have damned my soul!
Your cable and its unnatural message cuts the last ties binding me to the past. Henceforth I go alone, a wanderer on the face of the earth, the cup of happiness dashed from my lips, life an inferno of What-Might-Have-Been—made so by the boy whom I gave the breath of life and who now brings down my gray hairs in sorrow to the grave.
Where I go and what becomes of me, you will never know. You will wonder after your dear father but the winds shall return no answer where he has gone—the hideous ingratitude of the course you have elected to pursue will arise and point taunting fingers at you. All your joys and happiness shall be blighted. The rain shall patter down and the night winds whine in the casements. And to you they shall say—“I am accursed!”I am accursed! My father has accursed me and nowhere on earth is there peace for my throbbing head!”
Therefore, farewell! When you look into the faces of your children, may your crime and ingratitude sear you to madness. In the midst of your laughter may you be sobered and the nectar of joy in your glass turn to vinegar. And if in the last great day, pursuing my right to happiness, I stumble and fall, on your head be my sin!
Already in the lowest depths of hell (in unhappiness and misery of spirit) I point my awful finger at you and I cry: “Curse you! Curse you! Curse you!”
Good-by forever!
Jonathan Hadley Forge.
Nathan looked through what his father had so dramatically enclosed: A lock of Edith’s baby hair tied with a tiny pink ribbon; a small tintype of himself and Anna Forge taken at some street fair back in the Nineties; two snapshots of Nathan taken the year before moving to Paris from Foxboro Center; a picture postcard of Main Street, Paris—lacking none of the features which had so depressed Madelaine Theddon—a newspaper clipping containing the first of Nathan’s poems copied by theSunday Globe—the cablegram of Nathan’s last message as Johnathan had received it in Japan.
Nathan soaked a half a doughnut in his lukewarm tea as the pathetic assortment lay before him. Then he read his father’s letter again and smiled. He had to smile.
He gathered up the envelope’s contents a quarter of an hour later. He jogged them together and for want of interest and a better place, slipped them between an ammonia bottle and the wall at the end of the shelf above the kitchen sink.
Next noontime Johnathan Hadley Forge, in the lowest depths of hell, was smeared with copious gobs of whisker-flecked lather from Nathan’s razor.
Nothing else being handy at the moment, Nathan used the letter for shaving paper!