CHAPTER XIXTACT AND DISCRETION
The box-shop was haunted!
Old Jake Richards made the discovery. He based his contention on concrete observation and abstract deduction.
Jake was the father of the Richards girl who had remained at work in the Forge factory during the “strike.” He had three boys and four other girls. The Richards family lived on the northern edge of the “flats” at the end of the road on which the box-shop was situated. It was a hollow-eyed gray house with broken steps, set back in a cluttered yard. It had a French roof and its blinds were missing and family bedding was everlastingly hanging from the second-story windows.
Jake was Caleb Gridley’s “all-around man” at the tannery, a sort of workman-foreman-superintendent. He had held the position for many years. Socially, from the mere location of his domicile, he did not exist. Then there was the nature of his trade, the skinning of carcasses. Lastly his gross prolificality in the matter of children. Openly he bragged of his wife’s versatility at giving birth to offspring in the morning and “doin’ a good week’s wash” in the afternoon. This may or may not have been true. In so far as fastidious Paris was concerned, however, it established Jake as somewhat beyond the pale.
Jake, old Caleb and a gang of steam fitters had worked until three o’clock one Sunday morning installing a new boiler in the tannery. Jake had plodded his weary way homeward just before daylight. Arriving opposite the box-shop office, he raised his eyes to receive the start of his life. There were not many starts in old Jake’s life, by the way. Most of them were stops.
The box-shop was built about fifty feet back from theroad. Not back so far, however, but that Jake had an unobstructed view of the office door. There were no lights in the gaunt, ark-like structure. The nearest arc lamp was an eighth of a mile away, across the waving acres of cattails, and rushes. Also the moon was going down.
Nevertheless, outlined quite clearly in the window of that inky black office door was a human torso. Also a very white face.
It was absolutely motionless,—that apparition. As Jake chanced to be in the shadow of the rushes across the road, it appeared to take no note of him or behave as though he had seen.
Jake could not pass onward. He stood rooted to the spot while icy chills played up and down his back. Who could be in an unlighted box-shop at three in the morning, standing grimly behind the door glass, gazing out into the waning night, “like corpses fresh from the grave?”
Jake was too far away to make out the features or gain any idea of identity. He simply remained motionless and watched.
Then as picture films dissolve and fade into gray nothingness, so that apparition dissolved into the blackness behind. The oblong of door window was empty once more.
Jake finally believed a great physical weariness had been responsible for an optical illusion. He went home. But he awoke his wife and told her and Milly and the oldest boy also awoke and heard.
The boy confided to his sister when the house had quieted:
“I seen lots o’ funny lights in the box-shop in the night! This ain’t no news to me! Huh, I thought dad had more brains!”
“Brains? Whatter you mean?” demanded Milly.
The young worldly wiseman laughed, turned over and went back to sleep.
It was Milly who carried the news to Nathan the following morning.
Johnathan never arrived at the office until nine or ten o’clock. But he never failed to set the alarm for five-thirty. When it banged off, he called to Nathan and keptcalling him until he had the boy awakened and groggily dressing.
Johnathan believed that a proprietor should always be the first one at a place of business in the morning. It set the proper example for the rest of the “help.” So Nathan always reached the place at a quarter to seven. Milly called Nat over behind the paper-cutter. She whispered what her father had seen before she shed her big over-sized cloak for work.
Nathan’s face colored queerly.
“Please keep this to yourself, Milly,” he ordered. “If it gets out, and the other girls believe it, they may quit in fright and refuse to come back, especially if I should want them to work overtime, nights.”
Milly promised. She would have promised “to go seventy miles up the Amazon River, turn to the right and stay there the rest of her life” if Nathan had desired it. So far as her small, commonplace soul was capable, she worshiped the young foreman as the Greeks once worshiped Apollo. Her feminine intuition grasped the difficulties Nathan encountered with his father’s twopenny policies. She sympathized with him. Because it had been Nathan’s business and Nathan’s father, she had remained in her place during the “strike.” Once when the boy had been compelled to work supperless until midnight, installing a new motor, she had plodded uptown in a storm of sleet and bought him a basket of lunch.
The boy was not insensible to these indications of interest. He felt rather buoyant about them. He was something in the nature of a lady-killer. But to “let himself go” down into the slough of such a liaison, he could not. Milly was “factory help.” Owner’s sons didn’t do such things. She was preposterously out of caste.
Yet he enjoyed the sensation of being the object of an unrequited affection. It flattered his vanity. Without appearing to do so, he threw favors in Milly’s way. Once when she injured her hand on a jagged box nail, he applied first aid, and second aid and third aid and fourth. He contended such dressings were merely saving the business from the expense of doctor’s fees. He was thus forestalling a suit for damages from Milly. It was a matter of business acumen, pure and simple. Once when Old Jake had beenabusively intoxicated and taken her weekly pay envelope cruelly in the street, Nat had called her back and presented her with a second envelope, from his own money. It made him feel rather heroic to do this.
Further than these small experiments in fire-playing, there was nothing between them. Of course not. There could never be anything between them. Yet there were times when the two found themselves alone together in the printing room, especially in the summer time when Milly’s collar disclosed a generous V of soft chest as white as milk, that the boy’s fancies ran riot. They carried him away, back to Foxboro Center days when he and I had first come in contact with the mystery surrounding sex, especially The Sex. She was only a factory girl. Of course. And yet, well, she had shown in a hundred crass ways that she loved him. She would love him more if he would allow it. All in all, it was not unpleasant. Yet the situation was not without its pathos. Milly could not help being one of Old Jake’s offspring.
Meanwhile, of course, he was in love with Carol, very much in love with Carol.
How much he was in love with Carol only the heart of a nineteen-year-old could attest.
Having discovered how easy and simple it was to keep nocturnal trysts, Nathan began to show a sudden filial docility which pleased and puzzled Johnathan. The father soon realized that an entire fortnight had passed during which he had accounted for every moment of his son’s time—perfect alibis in every instance—and not once had Nathan seen or spoken to the girl. If Nathan had gone two weeks without her, of course he had taken his father’s counsel and given up the Sybarite forever. That was only logic. If the boy showed a strange and unaccountable drowsiness around three o’clock each afternoon, or if it became increasingly difficult to awaken him each morning at five-thirty, it was—according to his mother—because he was “working too hard to the shop.” To which Nathan amusedly subscribed. Because he had given heed to his father and yielded obedience without that threatened murder beingnecessary, Johnathan conceived the idea of letting the boy have a week’s vacation and take a little trip somewhere, say down to Nantasket. Nathan, however, failed to enthuse. With visible relief on Johnathan’s part, the vacation idea was swiftly dropped. The father did not cease from reminding the son of the former’s magnanimity, however, when later differences arose upon other matters.
The thing which troubled Nathan in those hectic days was Edith’s propensity to be allowed the same nocturnal privilege. It was quite all right for Nathan to spend his nights in the company of a reasonably pretty girl who was treated “cruelly” by her relatives. He was a man. But MacHenry shot too good a game of Kelly pool to make Nathan feel that a duplication of the stunt by his sister was advisable. His anxiety was ended one morning, however, when Edith fell over a chair in the outer hallway on her return, before her brother knew she had been out. The parents did not awaken but Nathan did. He leaped out to find Edith’s hair down and her clothing torn. One sleeve of her shirt waist was slit to ribbons and she was limping painfully.
“What’s happened, Edie; where you been?” the brother cried frightenedly.
“Oh, he tried to get too fresh!” was the sister’s rejoinder. She went to her room, destroyed the torn waist and slipped into bed. The MacHenry fellow disappeared from town next day. While Nat had never given his consent to Edith’s nocturnal absences nor abetted them, he was thankful his sister’s interest had waned.
For Nathan, however, no summer was ever quite like that summer. For spring passed and June came, and at least three times a week he left his room as soon as he heard his father’s heavy snoring to return in the moist, mystic hush of dawn—dawn broken only by the energetic chirping of countless song birds and the dull knocking rattle of distant milk wagons.
The news which Milly Richards had brought advised him that he was growing overbold, however. For two weeks thereafter, he and Carol took the Gilberts Mills road instead of going down to the box-shop, where the girl spent the night nestled in her lover’s arms.
So it was not this illicit tryst-keeping, finally wrecked by its own success, that caused Johnathan’s complacency to explodein his face. It was a letter that inadvertently fell from Nathan’s hip pocket one day in the mill and which Joe Partridge brought with a grin to Johnathan.
“Picked up some private correspondence,” he observed. “Guess it belongs to Nathan.”
Private correspondence? Nathan?
Johnathan took the bulky envelope addressed in a woman’s round hand to his son at the local postoffice,—General Delivery. He pulled out the sheets and the opening salutation struck him between the eyes like a brick.
Johnathan was limp all over when he had finished that effusive epistle. The father scarcely had the strength to rise from his chair. He found his hat and coat and went out into the August sunshine. He must think, think.
So they were keeping the asinine courtship alive by correspondence? Fool that he was, he might have suspected.
Yet John had read between the lines of the girl’s letter what was no thumb-nail sentiment between lovesick adolescents. The two addressed each other now as grown man and woman. Fortunately, no references had been made by Carol to their nocturnal rendezvous. Johnathan never knew—and does not appreciate to this day—toward the brink of what precipice he did all in his power to drive his boy. But he knew that Nathan had asked the girl to be his wife. She had accepted him. They were only waiting the saving of enough money on Nathan’s part and the making of enough “clothes” on Carol’s to perfect an elopement.
The father’s imagination and self-pity started on a rampage again. His temper began to growl. By six o’clock he was a roaring small-town lion, seeking whom he might devour,—principally something in the boy line under twenty-one.
Tact and discretion! Tact and discretion!
Johnathan knew he should employ them, that hemustcontrol his temper or another time he might break worse than his knuckles. Yet how could he save his son from this horribly yawning pit of premature matrimony? At last he had it! Archibald Cuttner!
It was true that Johnathan did not know Archibald Cuttner only as he sometimes thrust the collection plate in front of him on Sunday mornings, or had brought his Congress shoes to the Main Street shop for resoling—“in the olddays”, as Johnathan already phrased it. But that did not deter him from going at once and laying his case before the girl’s grandparent in a great tumult of hysterical fatherhood.
The Cuttners were finishing the evening meal as Johnathan rang the bell. Old Archibald, a thin little man with queer, humped shoulders, came out with his napkin still tucked in his turkey neck.
They sat down in the porch chairs for a time and Johnathan handed the girl’s letter across and Archibald read it.
“God!” was Cuttner’s comment as he finished page after page of the “mush.” It disgusted him as much as it had angered Johnathan. It had been fifty years since Archibald had been nineteen and in love.
“S’pose we walk a pace,” he suggested. “I’d like to smoke. And we’ll talk.”
The two men left the house and while Cuttner puffed at a long black cheroot, Johnathan narrated his parental “troubles” from the first.
“Yer right, Forge,” the old man agreed. “Getting a boy past the ‘girl age’ is the hardest job a man can have shoved on to him—and the most thankless. Give ’em a free rein and the young asses go stick their heads in the trap o’ married care. Tighten the rein and it only makes ’em crazier to get at it. So what’s a man to do, anyhow? I’m beginning to think we don’t lay on the harness tug these days strong enough—to begin with—girls as well as boys.”
“That doesn’t save Nathaniel from this misalliance with your granddaughter now. What can we do?”
“What do you want I should do—at the girl end of it?”
“Couldn’t you send her back where she came from?”
“Back to A-higher? Yeah, I can send her back to A-higher? But what assurance you got this balky young colt won’t kick over the traces the minute she’s gone and start after her, dragging the whiffletree?”
“I’ll attend to that. You get the girl out of town. I’ll keep with him and watch him if I have to eat and sleep with him every night from now till the time he’s twenty-one.”
“Won’t be able to help yerself then, will yer?”
“But he’ll be a man grown, then, in the eyes of the law. He’ll know his own mind.”
“Ain’t far from it now, Forge. Nineteen, ain’t he?”
“But two years at this period makes all the difference in the world. Anyhow, if he deliberately goes wrong the moment he’s of age, my hands are clean. I’ll have done my duty in the eyes of the law and of God. After that, he’s got only himself to thank if he makes a foul bed and has to lie in it.”
So Johnathan found an unexpected ally in Archibald Cuttner. And the latter returned home to order Carol to “pack her traps and go back to her folks.”
Johnathan was especially jovial and agreeable about the house that night. He came in whistling. He cracked a couple of ancient jokes and talked about “sparing the money” to get the hall papered. His family looked at one another in puzzled astonishment. Mrs. Forge asked for ten dollars to spend on clothes and got five, three of which were promptly appropriated by Edith for a waist to wear to a dance that she was going to attend unbeknown to her parents. All of them felt electrically that some extraordinary business was afoot.
The family retired about ten o’clock. The lights went out. Johnathan fell asleep almost at once. He said it was easy for him to fall asleep because he always had a clear conscience.
But Nathan, sitting in his room, heard a sudden familiar whistle on the walk outside, about midnight. He escaped by the usual method to find his sweetheart in tears. They had walked a considerable distance before Nathan learned the cause. Now her grandfather was “cruel” to her.
“Oh, Nathan! I’ve got to go back to A-higher. He—he—doesn’t want me around here any more.”
Nathan heard this with a clammy throttling of his heart. Then his mind leaped intuitively to his father’s unusual affability that night.
“Carrie—I’ll bet five dollars my father’s seen your gramp and they’ve clubbed together to bust us up!”
“I’m sick and disgusted with being treated like children by two old bigots!” the girl cried vehemently. “I’m almost ready to quit!”
“Quit?” cried Nathan in alarm.
“Yes—quit! We’re grown up, now! What difference does a couple of years make, anyhow?”
“Let’s risk the box-shop once more, Carrie. Let’s go down and talk it over and—I’ll hold you.”
“Holding her” was eminently to be desired by all witnesses to these presents. So toward the box-shop they headed.
It was a close, muggy night with the heat lightning playing off in the low northwest. Clouds hid the moon and stars. The dusty earth was thirsty for rain. Most of the lamps were already extinguished in the houses en route as boy and girl made their way down toward the “flats.”
They stole into the shadowed factory yard, keeping well out of sight close to the rushes. Nathan unlocked the door softly. On tiptoe they entered. The door was locked behind them. The office was very stuffy. It smelled of musty ledgers and wintergreen library paste. High on the wall a philosophical old clock ticked on through the night.
The boy removed hat and coat. He pulled out one of the cane-seated swivel chairs. Almost before he had seated himself the girl was in his arms and sobbing convulsively on his shoulder.
Nathan pulled out a low desk-drawer for his feet. He leaned back and smoothed the girl’s soft chestnut hair. The lone arc lamp far across the rushes shone weirdly into the room, making a rectangular splotch of light upon the western wall.
“Oh, Natie,” the girl sobbed softly, “I love you so! I don’t want to go back to A-higher! And they treat me so cruel—so cruel! My stepmother doesn’t like me and my gramp doesn’t want me. I wish I was dead!”
“You’ve got me, dear,” the boy reminded her. A thousand love-struck swains would have said the same.
“But I won’t have, Natie, if I go back to A-higher!”
“Oh, Carrie, I wish I was sure dad wouldn’t have our marriage annulled. I’d say let’s get married right off now and spite him. But I’m afraid he would. He’s just that crazy against me having a girl of any sort, you or anybody. Then again, here’s the shop. This’ll be mine some day, if I don’t run off. I’m making it into a whale of a business.Oh, Carrie, if dad would only be sensible like other boys’ fathers! If he only would!”
“Natie, tell me something.” The girl’s voice was soft. Her face was averted. She picked aimlessly at one of his shirt buttons. “Is that why you’ve dodged running away and getting married up to now? Because you’ve been afraid your dad would have our marriage annulled? Because you weren’t of age, maybe?”
“Yes, Carrie. That’s—the—reason.”
A long silence ensued. The girl’s weeping had ceased. The night and the world were very quiet, excepting for a light hot wind which was blowing over the rushes in the vanguard of a shower. Some of the rushes brushed eerily against the box-shop walls. The old building gave off queer creakings and night noises upstairs. A mouse nibbled at something which rattled in a far corner.
“Oh, Carrie!”
The boy drew a thick poignant sigh. The girl turned her pale face up to his for a kiss. She got it. Both sighed. She nestled close. The clock ticked—ticked—ticked——
Suddenly the boy sensed that the girl was trembling. She raised her free hand and smoothed his hair for a moment. Then gradually she dropped it—dropped it down to her own face—held it across her eyes.
“Nathan,” she whispered softly.
“Yes, Carrie!”
The girl drew a quick breath—with an effort. She placed her lips close to her lover’s ear and whispered.
Young Nat Forge, “incorrigible son,” sat with the girl he loved at nineteen,—sat and held her close. And his throbbing eyes stared across fields of romance, down into valleys ofverbotenAvalon where acacia trees grew too thickly at a moment for passage through.
It was a woman who came to the first man in the Garden. She carried fruit of the knowledge-tree of good and evil and bade him eat. Yet perchance she loved him no less on that account.
It was a quarter to three. The storm had rolled and clacked above the sleeping town and countryside. The office hadbeen lighted by swift and vivid whips of electric violence. The deluge of nocturnal rain had washed the earth cool and pure again. Steadily in a corner trough outside, an eaves spout emptied with a singing sound,—even as the deserted streets ran mud and rivulets.
The girl still lay in Nathan’s arms. She had not moved. Neither had moved. The boy’s muscles ached. The air was horribly stuffy, almost sickish. Morning would come now—was coming—swiftly.
“Carrie,” said the boy huskily, “there’s a lot we owe to ourselves—to our own—happiness! In fourteen months I’ll be of age. Fourteen months can be a long, long time—or awful, awful short. Suppose, dear, you do as your grandfather wishes—go back to Ohio. Stay there—as best you can. Live as I’ll be living—for the day I’m twenty-one. On that day you and I’ll be married.That’show much I love you, dear!”
The girl sensed rebuke in his pronouncement. Her face burned. Unconsciously she shrank away. She wholly lacked the capacity to appreciate the depth of the lad’s great affection or the worth of his soul thereby disclosed. The lad went on quickly:
“Go away as if we didn’t mind—as if we agreed to the separation. But I’ll find some one in town to whom you can mail your letters—who’ll slip them safely to me without dad knowing. We can write——”
“Nathan, are you so weak, so under your father’s thumb, that you’re afraid to outwit him?”
“No,” the other whispered. “I’m not.” And he spoke the truth. “I love you, dear. I told you that before.”
“Do you think it’s easy for me to go?” The girl’s voice was tight with pain. What was it she feared? What had happened that night, affecting them both so vitally?
“No easier than it is for me to stay. It’s always hardest for the one who stays, Carrie!”
“You’re a man! Such things mean more to a woman than a man.” They had both traveled far from the night they had talked drivel in the Cuttner sitting room.
“It seems to me the right thing to do, Carrie. There’s really nothing else!”
The girl left his arms. She went to the door. With hands on hips, she stood looking out.
“I see—you don’t love me—as much as I thought you did!” she said bitterly.
“Carrie!” The boy’s cry rang sharp. “Don’t say that! Don’t!”
“What else can I say?”
“Carrie! I——”
“Let’s go home, Nathan. It must be almost morning!”
He came around in front of her. He laid tender hands upon her shoulders. He forced her to look up into his drawn young face.
She suffered it, yet brokenly. She had lifted back a veil from the vestal treasures of her Inner Shrine and he had mocked those treasures somehow. So she believed.
“Carrie,” he promised, “I’ll wait for you, I’ll work for you, I’ll plan for you, I’ll bend all my effort and all my life to make you happy. And it will be very sweet when it comes, dear,—very sweet.”
Her eyes blinked at him several times in the dusk. She turned her face away without answering, off toward that distant arc lamp across the acres of rain-washed rushes.
“I’ll go!” she said in a strained voice. Then she hung her head suddenly.
Nathan raised her face again and drew her to him. Their lips met. But the perturbed boy suddenly shuddered. Carol’s lips were cold, unresponsive.
The boy’s joints were stiff. There was a bitter, brackish taste in his mouth. His head throbbed from lack of sleep. But from his finger he slipped a small bloodstone ring he had purchased the week following the “strike” with the first big money he had ever owned. He found the girl’s left hand. It was cold, lifeless. But the ring fitted her finger. He kissed it.
“Let it stay there dear—until—until——”
The girl turned away. At the door again she stood looking out. Around and around on her finger she turned the ring.
They stole forth from the building and yard. And vivid to Nathan came memory of another day back in younger boyhood when he had stolen forth so from a wood,—backto a picnic ground, wondering why he was not entirely happy, why the kisses of a girl had become cloying and tasteless. Only with this difference: there was no father now to meet and flog him.
Carol went ahead. They had to pick their way carefully or sink ankle-deep in mire. The town still slept but it had changed somehow. It had changed.
No further word was spoken until the Cuttner gate.
The girl shuddered when with a proprietary right the boy took her in his arms for the final embrace.
“Oh, Natie!” she cried huskily, “you’ll never, never know!”
“Know what, dear?”
“I can’t tell you! You wouldn’t understand. Good-by, dear! It’s—it’s getting light and some of the neighbors might see us.”
She had never remarked upon this before.
“When will you be leaving, dear?” he asked when he could trust himself to speak.
“On the eleven o’clock, probably.” It was a spiritless answer. “There’s no use for me waiting around—if I’m really going.”
“But, Carrie! Don’t take it that way! Don’t act as if I were sending you off.”
“What else are you doing, Nathan? Good night, dear. I’ve got to go in! It’s getting lighter and lighter.”
“I’ll be at the station to see you off if I have to lock dad in a closet to do it!”
“Your dad! I hope he’ll feel satisfied with what he’s done! He’s made a good job of it—and you!”
Up the steps she crept stealthily and into the house. Though she waved him good-by at the door, the boy was miserable. But she was gone and nothing remained but for him to go also.
The Forge box-shop was never notable thereafter for any untoward spiritualistic phenomena.
It rained that morning. A steady drizzle continued to fall in the aftermath of the thunderstorm. At the breakfasttable Nathan had looked his father straight in the eye and announced:
“Dad, Carol Gardner’s leaving town for Ohio this morning. I’m going down to see her off!”
Johnathan was angered by the way his son spoke. But he decided, after all, he could afford to be magnanimous. A boy Nat’s age ought to begin to have a few privileges.
“I understand,” the father answered. And he prepared to leave for the shop as though it was quite the usual thing.
So Nathan went to the depot to spend a last few minutes—wildly sweet, bitterly poignant—with the first girl he had loved with the maturing affection of a man.
The clouds never dripped a more depressing, groggy rain. The station platform was a long, greasy puddle. Bobbing umbrellas were everywhere as the down train to the junction pulled in.
“Well Carrie—good-by,” he said at last.
“Good-by, Nathan,” she answered.
“Till we meet again.”
“Yes! Till we meet again!”
That was all either had the chance to say. A crowd of rain-soaked travelers bore the girl away from him, into a small umbrella-closing mob around the car steps. Carol managed a last wave from the platform of the coach. Then she had to attend to the business of finding a seat. The train pulled out.
“My God! Have I done the right thing—letting her go?” the heartbroken boy cried hoarsely, as the train drew slowly from the platform, gathering speed as it clicked on shining rails down the yards. But there was no one to answer his heart-cry.
The train had gone. Carol had gone. The town remained—the factory—work—memories!
It rained that morning!