CHAPTER VIIIPRAYER
Bernie Gridley soon acquired a girl chum, a boy-baiting little blond with a profile like the face on an old-style quarter-dollar. Her name was Elinore Carver.
As I was Nathan Forge’s squire, Elinore became my Heart’s Desire. Which may read like “peanut” poetry but which really did possess so much poetry at the time that I am allowing the euphony to remain.
Thus did our quartette facilitate the course of true love, conspire to make it run smoothly and hoodwink our parents considered as being meddlesome outsiders on general principle. Family catechisms in the evening as to our associations during the day probed in vain for any milk-and-water assignations so long as the parties on all sides could swear truthfully that they had traveled during the shining hours with those of their own sex and any propinquity came about in pairs and purely by accident.
Although Bernie’s mother did her worst to keep her offspring an exasperating little prig, still in her heart the Dresden Doll was a daughter of Eve. And ere long it was accepted in school that she and Nathan had been called and by one another chosen.
Peter Taro, the school’s bad boy, had individualistic ideas about it, however. Peter was too crude, too far down in the social scale, to acquire a sweetheart. Therefore he had a propensity to make light of the tenderest sentiments of others. He would walk on the opposite side of any Lover’s Lane—meaning any village street whereon boy and maid could woo without the horrible possibility of being met by parents or those who would carry tales to parents—and make of himself a general nuisance. On picket fences with a stick he would beat a tom-tom. Or he would carry onloud-voiced conversation with the Romeo in the case on subjects of which the Juliet was ignorant. Being snubbed or rebuked, he sought vengeance in rhyme. His lines apropos of Nathan’s affair ran:
“Get your fiddle and feel quite fiddley;—Nathan Forge and Bernice Gridley!”
“Get your fiddle and feel quite fiddley;—Nathan Forge and Bernice Gridley!”
“Get your fiddle and feel quite fiddley;—Nathan Forge and Bernice Gridley!”
“Get your fiddle and feel quite fiddley;
—Nathan Forge and Bernice Gridley!”
This sort of thing he shouted at the top of his lungs to the perplexity of the neighborhood and the edification of the grown-up world in general. Bernice affected to be furious. So ultimately Nathan had to fight the Taro boy. Which he did—adequately.
It was the first fight of Nathan’s career—a “kid-fight” perchance—but no less virile or significant on that account. For like many quiet, peaceable men, when aroused the boy became a fury. Lithe as a cat, nimble as a bantam-weight, he pounded Peter Taro until the blood-smeared youngster fled.
Those were days of bliss and nights of heartburn. Vividly the hours come back that we spent before kitchen mirrors, steam-misty with boiling cabbage or wash-water of our homes, tying and retying our “cravats”, plastering down our hair with pilfered bay rum. If we had the front of our hair parted and well pasted down, and the toes of our shoes reasonably shined, we were groomed satisfactorily for hymeneal campaigning.
That each of us possessed a hat-lifting cowlick in the rear like the business paraphernalia of a small porcupine and that our heels were eternally yellow with mud were among the happy paradoxes of boyhood. We were as we were when we looked in our mirrors—when we posed for phrenological inventory and profile analysis. And besides, a good soldier in either war or love never looks behind anyhow.
We had followed the two little girls homeward one afternoon, chaffing and mauling each other as we would never have done if they had not been somewhere about to see, when we returned along the Green River in the afterglow. Eventuallywe threw ourselves down on a knoll. While we idled there, the valley grew hushed and the stars came out.
“Say, Nat,” I demanded, “whatcher goin’ to be when you grow up?”
“A writer and a poet,” he answered without hesitation.
I pondered this. We were emerging from the period when manhood meant freedom to turn pirate or Indian fighter. If Nathan had declared his intention of becoming a locomotive engineer or a clown in a circus, I should not have hesitated to take him at his word. But a writer—a poet!
“Aw, go on!” I retorted. “Poets don’t make no money!”
“I dunno’s I wanner make money.”
I looked at him. His face—growing a bit less freckled now—was held between his hands as he lay on his chest and looked vaguely off across the smooth river where the trout were jumping. But before I could comment caustically on this he asked, “Whatter you gonna be, Billy?”
“I dunno. I’ll be a business man, I guess, and make barrels of money—as much as Mr. Gridley.”
“What kind of business?”
“Oh, I dunno. I’ll own a factory, I guess—and be president of a bank afterwards, so when I want money all I gotta do is go into my bank and help myself.”
We lay in silence for several minutes. Then I persisted:
“If you’re gonna be a writer, whatcher gonna write?”
“Oh, books and poems and things—that hurt me so much sometimes when I look at ’em.”
“Huh! That ain’t a regular business. That’s a lazy man’s job. Judge Prescott says so. His daughter, Annie, married somebody who writes poetry and the Judge has to support both of ’em. I heard him say so. Betcha your pa don’t letcher, anyhow!”
“Betcher he will! Betcher he won’t have anything to say about it—damn him!”
Nathan’s lips tightened. It was not petulancy; it was the bitterness of mistreated childhood.
“You ought not to swear about your father, Nat,” I told him, horrified.
“Why not? Is it worse to say what I think than to go around with it makin’ me mad inside?”
“No, but it’s wicked to swear about your folks. You won’t live long. The Ten Commandments says so.”
“Aw, whatter I care for the old Ten Commandments? All the Bible and the church and things is made for anyhow is to back up grown folks when they wanner work off their hell on us kids!”
“Don’t you believe there’s a God?”
“Well, somebody probably made all the stars and trees and flowers—all the pretty things. But it spoils it to think it’s the same person that dad says is so precious to his soul every week in prayer meetin’. See that evenin’ star now, Billy, hangin’ low over Haystack. Ain’t it pretty? S’pose anybody that made such a shinin’ star would be in partnership with a growed-up person who’s so tight he won’t buy his kid a pair o’ pants? Billy, whatter we got all this God-business and church-business crammed down our throats for? Why can’t we just drink it in by comin’ out to a place like this, where it’s all quiet, and watchin’ an evenin’ star?”
“But we gotta love our parents, Nat. The Bible says so!”
“Yeah—and the same Bible says we oughta be clean and peaceful and good inside. And when a feller hates anybody like I hate my father, how can he turn around and say he loves him and act like he loves him, when he don’t?”
“All the same,” I reiterated, “the Bible says we gotta, and we have!”
“Well, I’ll do it till I’m twenty-one,” assented Nathan, “’cause I can’t help myself. Then I’ll go to hell and roast, if it’s wicked—but I’ll stop lovin’ him and do as I honest please. Between the time I’m twenty-one and the time I go to hell, I’ll feel peaceful and satisfied for a while, anyhow.”
I felt my friend was damning himself irrevocably, sinning against the Holy Ghost. I had to get away from those sulphur fumes, so I went back to poetry.
“Howja know you can write poetry to make your livin’ at it? Have you tried?”
“Yeah! Lots of times. It’s a cinch!”
“You mean you’ve got some poems writ already?”
“Sure, slathers of ’em.”
“Where are they?”
“Home—locked up so Pa won’t get ’em—along with Bernie’s letters.”
“What’s your Ma think about you bein’ a poet?”
“Oh, she don’t think nothin’, only what a hard time she has with Pa and that Edith will marry money.”
“Ain’t you ever talked with her about it?”
“I see myself!”
“Thunder! Can’t you go to your Ma and talk about—things—when you wanna?”
“No! ‘Stead o’ that, I have to listen to Ma’s troubles. And if I don’t happen to agree with her, she gets to twitchin’ all over her face and goes off to rock in the dark by herself. She tells me, ‘Oh, you’re growin’ up into a small-sized edition of your father!’ Damn her, too!”
“But if you can’t talk with your Ma about things, and what you’re gonna be when you’re growed up, who can you talk ’em with?”
“Don’t talk ’em with nobody—exceptin’ you sometimes. Keep ’em to myself. That’s why I wanner marry Bernie just as quick as I can. I gotta feelin’ way down inside that she’ll listen when she’s my wife, and help.”
He spoke the word wife with difficulty.
“I have always understood my children perfectly,” declared Anna Forge years later, when the Forge domestic structure went down in wreckage, as it was bound to go down in wreckage. “Edith would have been all right if it hadn’t been for her brother’s example always before her. And Nathan, he took after his father—bigoted, stubborn, cold-blooded, hard-hearted, indifferent to those who have thanklessly tried to do their utmost to help him.”
“I have always understood my children perfectly,” contended Johnathan Forge to old Archibald Cuttner, when five years later Johnathan was having a hysterical time to keep Nathan from marrying his granddaughter. “Edith takes after her mother—fizzle-headed, irresponsible, neurotic, always thinking of herself and her troubles, inconsistent, a woman in every sense of the word. As for Nathan, God only knows who he takes after. I’m almost ready to believehim sent to me as my cross. I trained the boy by example and precept to walk uprightly, flee evil, honor and respect his parents, worship God. But he is determined to go his own way, regardless of my counsel. It’s partly the age in which we live that’s to blame. Disrespect and profanation is in the very air the rising generation breathes.”
“I am persuaded,” wrote a popular clergyman recently, “that what this age needs more than all else is abstersion from the follies and ‘broad-mindedness’ of this blatant day; we need to return to the ‘good old time,’ the fundamental things,—unconditional respect for parents, rigorous observance of the Sabbath, the replacement of woman back in the home where Nature intended her to function; less frivolous nonsense and ‘isms’ in our educational systems and more reading-writing-and-arithmetic, good, old-fashioned fear of fire and brimstone thundered from our pulpits and a wholesome terror of the wrath of God injected into the hearts of a shallow and mocking generation who bow down and worship the Golden Calf.”
“I hope,” remarked Uncle Joe Fodder, the town philosopher, one night when he and I discussed the Forges—“I hope the Lord’s got a sense o’ humor! How could He remain the Almighty without it?”
The Forges, on coming to Paris, had taken a small gray cottage on Spring Street. This cottage stood on a corner with a short width of yard between the Adams Street sidewalk and the windows of the Forge dining room. And on summer nights when the heat required opened windows, neighbors and pedestrians overheard the full barrage of vocal artillery that husband and wife laid down over trivial family matters or the scion who was “bringing their gray hairs down in sorrow to the grave.”
From the day he was born until the day he married, the boy seemed a bone of contention between his parents. For the most part these altercations had to do with his mother’s animosity toward the father’s method of raising his family. But always, when the man’s brutality got the better ofhysterical argument, the affair ended with the wife’s contention, voiced in no very refined terms, that she “was going home to her mother.”
I forget how many times Anna Forge “went home to her mother”, if I ever knew. She threatened to do it a couple of times a week. About twice a year she made the threat good. On these occasions she packed all her personal clothes and possessions in several bags and telescope valises, took a half day to “wash and iron the children”; called Uncle Joe Fodder’s depot hack and “left her husband in style”, as Uncle Joe put it.
She returned to a grass-widowed mother who lived in a small manufacturing city out in York State. This mother sympathized with her the first day; listened in silence to her troubles the second; was indifferent to them the third; tolerated them the fourth; endured them the fifth; “had words” with her daughter the sixth; quarreled with her openly on the seventh and ordered her out of the house on the eighth. Then back Anna Forge returned to John, entered her own home haughtily, failed to speak to him until the third day, then started around the six-month cycle all over.
These semiannual trips were gala days in the lives of Nathan and his sister,—until he began to realize the tragedy that sponsored them.
One night he came running over to my house in great distress. He “whistled me out” and I found him sobbing distraughtly.
“Pa an’ Ma have had an awful fight, Billy!” he told me. “Pa wouldn’t give her no money for a dress to-day. But when he came home from downtown he fetched one he’d bought himself. Ma looked at it and said she wouldn’t be seen in the thing. Pa says she could wear it or go naked. They got to havin’ words, Billy, and pretty soon Ma picked up the butcher knife and says by the White Christ she’d cut Pa’s throat. And Pa chucked a blue-glass pitcher at her all full o’ milk and said she was full o’ high-flown Yankee notions and he’d take ’em out of her. Ma says she’d go back to her mother and Pa says, ‘Yes, that’d be a good scheme, only in a few days she’d have a fight with her mother and be right back again.’ Then Ma says she’d chuck herself in the river. And Pa says she didn’t have the guts, And Ma says oh, she didn’t have, did she, and startedright out of the house. She’s off toward the river now, Billy, and I’m scared stiff she’ll do it.”
“You mean she’s went to commit suicide?” I demanded aghast.
“Yeah!—And her forehead was all bloody where the pitcher struck her.”
“How long’s she been gone?”
“She just started. I came right over. Pa sent me up to bed and I skipped out over the woodshed roof.”
“Can she swim?”
“No! Anyhow, people that’s committing suicide don’t care whether they can swim! Most of ’em don’t!”
“Gosh, she may really kill herself. Whatcher want me to do?”
“Come with me, Billy. Maybe we can stop her!”
We reached the river but found no woman. Nathan felt for a certainty his mother had cast herself into the water and would not be consoled. He knelt upon the close-cropped grass and with face on his hands he sobbed distressingly.
“Why can’t I have a Pa and Ma that don’t fight all the time?” he cried hysterically. “Other fellows do! Why can’t I? Oh, Ma! Ma! Ma!”
I tried to console him but I was rather ill myself. Somehow I felt responsible for Mrs. Forge’s death, not having reached the stream in time to intercept and dissuade her. My own face was awash with tears as I tried to persuade my friend to go home and tell his dad.
“I climbed out on the shed roof and skun away,” cried Nathan. “I’m scared stiff to go home again—ever! He’ll whale the daylights out o’ me fer tellin’ anybody about it, even you!”
“We better go somewheres,” I argued. “We can’t save her now. And we can’t stay out here all night. You better come home with me, and I’ll tell my Ma and she’ll see what you better do. She ain’t afraid of your Pa! She’ll tell him what she thinks of him. My Ma’s great at tellin’ your folks what she thinks of ’em!”
I persuaded Nat to come home with me. It was a tragic return.
My mother gathered us against her ample bosom, an arm about each of us, while she listened to the horror of thething we blurted out. Then she smiled sadly and kissed us.
“Bless your hearts! Nathan’s mother has been here with me, telling me about it,” mother said. “She must have turned back through Pine Street while you were on the way to the river. She wouldn’t kill herself. She loves Nathan too much to do that. She said so!”
Nathan’s mother went home that night and when she reentered the house, John Forge looked up from his paper and said:
“Huh! Back, are you? I thought so!”
The mother passed up to bed with some hot retort about “her life belonging to her children”.
But she cried all that night and John Forge slept on the downstairs sofa.
“I heard him say it was a hell of a home,” Nathan told me afterward.
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 wassmall 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!”
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 praythe 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.
The red-letter days in our lives, however, were the Friday-night “sociables” and bean suppers, or the concerts given for Easter, Harvest and Christmas.
Absolutely forbidden company or contact with the other sex by narrow parental decree, the boy Nathan, being a normal, healthy youngster, had either to repress natural maturing emotions until they found outlet in clandestine, perverted channels, or he had to gain worldly knowledge and sex-poise by the hard, raw route of searing experience when John was no longer able to make his decree effective.
John Forge’s argument was that sex, as well as money, being a basic root of all human evil, the way to keep a boy from disaster was to prohibit him the company of sex altogether.
John Forge had married unhappily, therefore all marriages were unhappy. Nat should not duplicate his father’s mistake if John had to kill him to save him from it.
If Nathan attended any school or neighborhood gathering and his father heard of it afterward, the man had two questions ready for his son: (1) “Were there any girls present?” and (2) “Did you kiss ’em?”
John Forge had a crazed obsession about his boy kissing a girl.
In the school yard and even at church “sociables” we often played asinine childish games, “Ring Around the Rosy”, “Copenhagen” and “Drop the Pillow.” But Nathan, fearing his father’s wrath, was ever the wallflower. And he was deeply in love with Bernice-Theresa, or thought he was. Other boys kissed their “girls.” Why shouldn’t he?
“I’ve got to kiss her! I’ve just simply got to kiss her!” he consequently affirmed to me; no emperor ever planned the ravishing of a rival kingdom with the sangfroid with which Nathan deliberated upon the necessity for osculatory assault on the Dresden Doll.
“The thing to do,” I advised gravely, “is to get her alonewhere she can’t scream or bring help. And it’s got to be done in such a way that she don’t tell her folks! Because then they’ll tell your folks and your dad will just simply kill you!”
This might seem impossible, but to fourteen nothing is impossible.
We thought of intriguing Bernice into the woods at the edge of town, into the haunted dwelling next to the tannery, into all sorts of lonely, lugubrious places. But the difficulty lay in enticing her to the rendezvous and operating on her rosebud lips without scaring the Dresden Doll half out of her senses and bringing a boomerang back upon ourselves. Ultimately we resolved upon a bold maneuver:We would kiss Bernice Gridley in church!
“We could send her and Elinore a note,” I planned, “asking ’em to wait after the Easter concert. I could keep Elinore and send Bernie out into the vestibule. Just as she comes through the door you could grab her and do it! Then run like the devil!”
This was bold. It was terribly bold! Yet it was feasible. We had yet to learn that the ecstasy of osculation consists largely in the warmth and passion of reciprocity. We were midget cavemen, Nathan and I. Bernice-Theresa had to be kissed if our lives were forfeit.
I blush now when I consider the terms of endearment in which our letters of those days were penned. Hours we spent writing them. The most indiscreet scion of Pittsburgh aristocracy never committed himself more idiotically (to repent subsequently in curses and coin) than Nathan and I described our holiest, hottest feelings for the edification of those little snobs. So the intriguing epistles were indited and delivered. The kissing of Bernice-Theresa was on!
Nathan and I sensed little of that concert. We were too much occupied visioning the epochal thing to ensue as its aftermath.
The concert began, ran its course and ended. And the Dresden Doll never appeared more bewitching than she did upon that platform. Two small boys caught each other’s eyes and wiped perspiration from youthful brows. The fatal day and hour had come. Did we have the nerve to go through with it? Only the fear of each thinking theother cowardly held us from fleeing that church when the organist began the postlude.
It had been a beautiful spring afternoon and during the concert a thunderstorm played above the village. But later the sun broke through upon a sweet and dripping world, and the weather gave our elders no cause to tarry. The two girls, silly and giggling, held converse with other little girls up near the altar rail. They had signified by signs and semaphoring to which grown folk have no code-book, that they would wait and consider the momentous things we had to propound. And the church continued to empty and the janitor to close the windows.
Nathan and I stood waiting in the vestry. It was shadowed out there. I occupied a doorway at one side. I saw the two little girls finally coming down the center aisle, and made a sign to Nat. He nodded. His limbs were turning to tallow; he was hoping he would not faint at the peak of the conspiracy when nerve alone was required to see it through.
At the next to the last pew the two girls parted. Elinore sidled off between the seats to make her way to my door. Bernie kept on and stepped into the vestry.
The instant she appeared, all the pent-up intrigue of weeks galvanized in Nathan.
I am not certain where he kissed her, but at the shock of a small boy hurtling himself dramatically from the shadows, the Dresden Doll recoiled and shrieked and wilted.
Nathan exploded his kiss, trusting it to hit its mark. He sensed much talcum powder and cologne in his nostrils, contact with adolescent flesh, sweet and soft and warm. Then, at the instant of glorious success, the wrath of God broke from the heavens and consumed him as the fire that blasted Sodom. From the skies above, from the earth, from the waters beneath the earth, from somewhere came a Voice, a terrible, blasting, annihilating Voice:
“Here! Here! Here! What the devil’s comin’ off here, anyhow?”
Nat snapped up into the air. Then he assumed a Direction. Luckily the open church door was ahead. Into the soft spring dusk he shot and began to tread the world beneath him crazily. His not to reason why, his but to fleeor die; Nathan cleared the doorstep into thin air and zoomed for the horizon. I was close behind him.
We negotiated the walk, the curb and the street. We made the opposite walk and kept on going. We went through Pat Larkin’s side yard and Mrs. Larkin’s choicest roses. A lot of sweet-pea vines came next, with most of them trailing behind us. Nat stepped on a cucumber frame and I plowed through a couple of yards of hen wire. Thereupon we got through the Alderman property into Adams Street. But we did not stop there.
We went through Adams Street, through Pine and Walnut. Then out of town by the pumping station. We covered two miles that night before we finally plunged into Bancroft’s Woods far down the river. There we crawled into the underbrush and squatted on our haunches.
Said Nathan, “Who was it?”
Said I, “It was Mr. Gridley!”
Sickening silence!
“Where’d he come from?” Nathan finally found strength to ask.
“He came down the belfry stairs! I remember now there was something the matter with the bell-rope this morning. He must have gone up with John Chase to fix it.”
“Her father!” groaned Nathan. “Billy—this is the end!”
“Not on your tintype it ain’t! It’s only the beginning!” I retorted.
“Billy—what are we going to do?”
So Guy Fawkes must have queried his lieutenants when the well-known Gunpowder Plot went slightly awry.
“I dunno, Nathan. It’s a cinch we can’t go home! We can’t ever go home again!”
“That’s right,” agreed Nathan. “Maybe Mr. Gridley is at my house right this minute, tellin’ it all to dad!”
“It looks, Nathan, as if we’d have to leave this place for good and all. Have you got any money?”
“Twenty cents,” said my friend, totaling his pockets.
“I’ve got a dollar-seventy in my bank at home, if I could sneak in and get it out.”
“That’d be a dollar-ninety. We could live a long time on a dollar-ninety.”
“Where’d we go?” I asked.
“West, I guess. Everybody goes west. Nap Taro wentwest and come back rich. Maybe down the future years, if we could come back rich, they’d forgive us.”
“But how’d we get there? It costs more’n a dollar-ninety to get west. And we gotta eat in the meantime.”
“We’d have to hop freight trains like the tramps. It’s a cinch we gotta get outa here or the police’ll catch us.”
“Oh, dear, I wisht we hadn’t done it!” I groaned.
“So do I,” lamented Nathan feverishly. “But it’s done now and can’t be undone.”
“That’s right. I don’t know as I ever heard of anybody unkissing a girl. And we won’t be able to grow up and marry Elinore and Bernie at all——”
“Maybe if we wrote a letter to ’em after we got west, they’d wait for us. Women do that sort of thing sometimes—till death.”
“But they’re probably mad at us by now.”
Nathan laid over on the rain-wet grass and hid his face in his hands. After a time he sat up and asked as men ask after drifting for weeks on an open sea:
“Billy, do you suppose it would do any good to pray?”
I considered this.
“Yes,” I said devoutly, relievedly; “let’s pray about it!”
“Who’ll pray, Billy, you or me? You pray!”
“No—you!” I argued. “You did the kissin’!”
“All right,” said Nathan brokenly. “But what’ll I say?”
“I’d ask God first to forgive the sin of it. Then I’d beseech Him to show us a way out—because we’re sorry—terribly sorry—and a way out is what we need most.”
Again Nathan considered, ashen-faced, biting his nails until the blood came. Then two distraught boys, hatless, their clothing bedaubed and briar-torn, facing the most hideous dilemma thus far in their lives, knelt in the shower-washed alders. Earnestly they besought aid from the giver of every good and perfect gift.
“Oh, God,” prayed Nathan, “we have sinned—we have sinned—against heaven and against Thee. Lord, we have kissed—we have kissed—no,Ihave kissed—a g-g-girl—and her father, Mr. Caleb M. Gridley, who runs the tannery here in Paris—he caught us!”
Nathan paused. He was very near sobbing. His voice broke several times in attempts to continue, striving to rememberorthodox forms of divine supplication which might be appropriate for the present situation.
“He—he—he caught us, oh, God!” went on Nathan. “Oh, God, we beseech Thee—we beseech Thee—not to wreak Thy anger upon us, nor visit us with Thy displeasure—displeasure. Hear our prayers, we pray Thee—we pray Thee—and have compassion upon us—upon us. Mr. C. M. Gridley is mad at my father anyhow, over a suit for some leather that ain’t never been settled up, and now that he knows I’ve kissed his daughter, he’ll probably get action on collection. Mr. John H. Forge, my father, will wreck his displeasure on me, his son. Oh, God, we didn’t mean to do it, God,—that is, we meant to do it but didn’t mean to get caught. Therefore shield and protect us in Thy infinite mercy, oh, God, and turn not Thine ear from us—Thine ear from us. Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil; for Thine is the power and the glory forever. Amen!”
Nathan turned quickly, anxiously.
“Did I say enough?” he demanded. “I suppose I might have laid it on stronger.”
I held some such idea, but it was unethical and inappropriate now to return and reopen the prayer. I said God was assumed to know everything and inferred that undoubtedly He realized the exigency of the present circumstances anyhow.
“What’ll we do now?” Nathan next asked. “Had we better go west?”
“No,” I finally decided. “Let’s wait and see how the prayer takes hold. The Bible says ‘Knock and ye shall find; seek and it shall be opened unto you’. I say we trust Him.”
“You mean go home?”
“Well, we can sort of sneak up and see what’s happened. And if the prayer don’t do nothin’ then we can think about going west afterward.”
This possessed sound points and as the stars were coming out and the frogs were piping shrilly in the boglands, we arrived by back roads and streets at the Forge cottage.
“Pa and Ma are at it again!” groaned Nat in a sick whisper. “Probably old Gridley’s been here and told’ em. Listen!”
I heard epithets applied to a woman which made my mother’s face whiten when I suggested them at bedtime.
“Nat and I heard ’em through the kitchen window,” I declared. “We was lyin’ underneath it, listenin.”
“Well, sonny, don’t you ever remember those words or think of them again. They mean horrible, vile, foul, wicked things. That’s all I can tell you that you can understand—now!”
“But Nathan’s father said ’em!”
“Then Nathan’s father is a wicked man, even if he does get up in prayer meeting and tell how precious the Lord is to his soul. And did Nathan get into the house?”
“Yeah, he sneaked up to bed the front way. The door was open.”
“Well, you see, dear, your prayer was answered, wasn’t it?”
“It looks so, Ma!”
“Always remember it, laddie. You’re going to get in tighter situations than you got into to-night. Don’t ever be ashamed to pray, laddie. It never harms and always helps.”
“Do you think God really heard it, Ma?”
“Your prayer was answered, wasn’t it, laddie?”
“Yeah, Ma!”
“Then isn’t that answer enough? What more need mother say?”
It developed that Mr. Gridley had not recognized the identity of his daughter’s demonstrative friend. In fact, he had forgotten the incident within ten seconds after Nathan had taken unto himself wings and flown. He was far more interested in finding a short ladder to fix that bell-rope.
Thus for the first time in a great vicissitude Nathan and I learned that the worst enemy a man can have is often his own imagination.
The battle royal between Nathan’s father and mother had been caused by something of graver import to my friend than any mere family adjustment between Forge and Gridley over osculatory assault upon a little girl. Ithad been caused by a decision voiced earlier that Sunday evening by Johnathan that he was determined to take Nat from school and put him to work.
Nathan was now past fourteen and legally entitled to his “papers” and educational “freedom.” John had been compelled to work ten hours a day at fourteen, turning his money over to his father. Nathan should do the same. And Mrs. Forge had objected, not so much for Nathan’s sake, as because it was Johnathan’s proposition.
Old Caleb Gridley, although holding a seventy-dollar court judgment over Johnathan, had never been able to collect his money. He had made John’s life a burden. So John had it in mind to suggest that Nathan be given a job in the tannery and work out his father’s debt.
Nathan, conceded the smartest boy who attended the Academy, was ultimately set to work at four dollars a week. Johnathan bought his peace with his conscience by generously returning his son twenty-five cents a week to be “squandered” in any way the boy chose.