CHAPTER XVIIVALLEYS OF AVALON
It was a rainy Sunday afternoon in March. Nathan lay on his bed and tried to read. But his book was developing into a love story, weak and asinine beside the greater love story he felt he was living. What was she doing; how wassheputting in that long, dreary, windy, Sunday afternoon?
A febrile restlessness ached in Nathan’s limbs. There was a hot, uncontrollable nervousness in his torso. The girl’s hazel eyes came between the lines of his story. Her face laughed at him witchingly ’twixt simile and metaphor. Verily the heroine of his narrative was but a painted bawd beside the diminutive figure in red and gray, always in the background of Nathan’s mind.
“I’ll go calling on her,” he avowed. “I’ll be darned if I won’t go calling on her.”
“Where are you headed for?” his father’s stern voice demanded as he crept softly down the front stairs.
“Out to take a walk,” the son answered sullenly. “I’ve read so long my head’s muddled.”
“I’ll go with you,” announced Johnathan. He arose from the couch and started after his hat and coat. Of course this was manifestly and emphatically what Nathan did not want. Yet how could he explain?
Vague rumors had come to Johnathan of late about his son being seen in the outlying sections walking with a girl. Johnathan at once had more “load” added to his burden. For ten years he had successfully “kept his boy away from girls”, or so he supposed. That was all very well while the son was a youngster. Nathan was no longer a youngster. He was eighteen and taller than his father. As his son had grown bigger than himself, as well as shown an alarming propensity for managing his own affairs, the time had comefor Johnathan to exercise “discretion, diplomacy and tact”, getting him past the “girl age.” It being Sunday and Nathan’s restlessness having culminated in a desire to walk, it was only too evident that he meant to meet a girl. Therefore Johnathan would frustrate any such assignation by becoming Nathan’s companion and chaperone. This was the father’s idea of exercising discretion, diplomacy and tact. A couple of years before he would have snapped, “You’ll do nothing of the sort. Go back to your room.” But the boy had to be given a little more leash now. He must not be opposed openly. He must be frustrated.
So Nathan bit his lip in anger and exasperation, execrating himself for not sneaking down the back stairs. He suffered himself to go to walk with his father and they talked about the business. Or rather Johnathan talked about business. Nathan answered in monosyllables.
Perhaps this tendency of Johnathan’s toward sudden discretion, diplomacy and tact had been partly augmented by the past month’s events at the factory.
The boy had begun to show a perturbing independence. He gave veiled hints daring his father to thrash him. For instance, the week following the quarrel about the Richards girl’s pay, Nathan had absolutely refused to work, “sulked” was what John Forge called it.
“If you can run that bunch upstairs better than I, that’s your privilege, Pa,” was the way he had put it.
Johnathan had purposed to demonstrate whether he was to be bullied and bulldozed by a few spoiled employees and a stiff-necked, incorrigible son. He had talked dramatically about the sharpness of a serpent’s tooth, thrown things about the office, stormed upstairs, donned a duster coat and proceeded to “boss his own factory.”
He had “bossed” it so adequately and completely that at twenty minutes to three o’clock that same afternoon, the men “walked out flat”, and all the girls but Milly Richards had been mysteriously missing one by one each time Johnathan came back from office calls downstairs.
Johnathan said all right! he was glad they had gone—itsaved him the trouble of firing a lot of cheap help whom his boy had spoiled with too much money. He would hire new and train them as he wanted them trained. Meanwhile he ’phoned for Edith and his wife to come down and paste boxes. Mrs. Forge came humbly enough but a dour time followed with Edith. According to Johnathan she was assimilating altogether too much of her brother’s growing incorrigibility.
During the next day John began hiring “new” help. It was a discouraging business. All workmen were spoiled these days, anyhow. They knew their places no longer. They expected too much money. All the men who responded wanted three to four dollars a day. No girls could be procured on a piece-work basis at any price because the cutting of the piece rate had quickly percolated through the laboring element of the community. John “took on” old Mike Taro to help unload a car of cardboard and two rouged and perfumed young ladies who had never held one job for two consecutive weeks anywhere in our section of Vermont. They were temporarily willing to accept three dollars a week apiece because they had “gentlemen friends”, they explained, who would help their otherwise slender exchequers. But all three of these failed to show up for work the second morning because Taro was dead drunk, and the rouged young ladies had been mysteriously warned to remain in discreet desuetude or direful calamities were liable to fall upon them from unexpected quarters, chiefly police.
The fourth day Johnathan sent for Joe Partridge, one of Nathan’s cutter-men. Joe came down late in the afternoon dressed in his painful best and smoking a cheap cigar. Johnathan took him into the office and “went into conference” with him. Joe listened for a time with an exasperating lack of servility.
“I don’t understand none of them big words,” Joe finally confessed. “But so far as us working folks is concerned, the situation is just this: Your boy Nat knows how to run this business better’n you. And until he comes back, we don’t care about working.”
This was flat and frank. Johnathan was angrily jolted.
“If that’s the way you feel about it, you’ll never come back,” he roared.
“I ain’t so sure about that.”
“You mean you’ll dictate to me how to run my own business?”
“No, but I reckon we got something to say about who’ll fill our jobs.”
“I’ll hire other people to take your places——!”
“Why ain’t you hired ’em already?”
“Because I wanted to be fair and square——”
“Oh, hell! You ain’t been able to get nobody to take our places! And you won’t be able to get nobody so long’s Nat stays away. We’re seein’ to that.”
“You mean you’ll intimidate any persons I may hire in your places?”
“We’ll knock the blocks off any one who takes a job here while we’re out. Yes!”
“You get out of my office!”
“Surest thing you know!”
Johnathan held out for nine days.
“I’m too nervously constituted to handle such cheap humanity as factory help,” he explained stiffly to Nathan the evening of the ninth day. “I’m not giving in, understand, or admitting you’re anything but a bumptious, swelled-headed boy. But I want you to go back upstairs and get those orders off—somehow! It’s only because I haven’t the patience and time to give to the manufacturing end that I’m temporarily sacrificing my principles——”
“The piece rate stands, Pa?”
“For the present, yes! When I’ve had time to study into it, we’ll go into conference over it.”
“All right—if you’ll promise to keep hands off, I’ll try to get the wheels turning once more. But, Pa!”
“Well?”
“I’m getting kind of sick working here for next to nothing. I want to go down on the books for twenty dollars a week.”
“Twenty dol——”
Johnathan nearly fell on his forehead.
“Twenty dollars, yeah!”
“Not a measly penny! You’re having two whole dollars a week now to squander——”
“I’m filling a superintendent’s job here that couldn’t be filled by any one else short of thirty. I’ll pay board athome. But I want what I’m worth and I’m not a bit unreasonable to ask it.”
They compromised on twelve dollars.
The box-shop “help” trooped back exultantly. Nat knew how to handle human nature. The peak of production was regained in a single afternoon.
Outside, the labor differences at the Forge plant were colloquially known as “the box-shop strike.” But Johnathan would have had an arm torn out before he would have admitted any strike. His boy had simply “poisoned the minds” of the help against his own father and they had refused to work.
“I’ve got an awful problem on my hands, Doctor Dodd,” he told the pastor of the Methodist church the following Thursday evening. “And where it’s going to end, the Father only knows. My son’s behavior is graying my hair. Think of him having no more filial loyalty than engineering a walk-out of my employees and keeping them out until I give him a raise in his wages of six hundred per cent!”
“God will humble him,” the kindly old man solaced. “The sympathy of the community is with you, Brother Forge!”
And now the long-dreaded, the sickening thing, had happened. All the father’s care and worry and training had gone for naught. Nathan had taken up with a girl!
Johnathan refused to believe it. It was absolutely impossible, after all his father had said to him, and warned him, and preached to him, and threatened. The boy simply couldn’t be such a deceiver, such a double-dealer, such an ingrate—such a sneak!
And yet rumors persisted. People had actually seen Nathan with the girl; swore they had seen him!
True, boy and girl had been doing nothing exceptionally amiss, except strolling along unfrequented by-paths looking rather sheepish and irresponsible, and acting mutually infatuated. Still, Nathan was deliberately disobeying his father; he was “carrying on” behind his father’s back. Suppose the hussy—she must be a hussy—intrigued the boy into premature matrimony! God in heaven!—Suppose hehad to marry her! Johnathan went icy at the horror of it. Better the boy lay dead in his coffin. Somehow he must be saved from his folly. Yet such was his precocity and independence that it must be done in a manner not to drive him into the girl’s arms or make him run away and therefore cause another loss of his services at the box-shop. Yes, in God’s name, what was the pitiable, harassed father to do? He prayed much over it. He lost sleep. His face grew drawn, and gray appeared in fine strands at his temples.
Then one Sunday afternoon in April Johnathan came home from a few hours’ work on his books to find the gas lighted in the front parlor and some one playing on the cottage organ.
The father purposely went around to the rear door. His wife was preparing supper in the kitchen.
“Who’s in the parlor?” he demanded hotly.
“Only Edith and a friend of hers—and Nathan.”
“A friend of Edith’s—a girl?”
“Yes! I didn’t think there was any harm letting them play on the organ.”
“Who is she—thegirl?”
“Her name’s Gardner. She’s visiting the Cuttners. She sang in the choir last Sunday.”
“Anna! Answer me, quick! Is it the girl Nat’s been seen publicly on the streets with?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps so! What if it is? There’s no crime in Nat being seen walking the streets with a girl, that I know of. Nat’s got to have his girl friends some time.”
“But my God, woman! Suppose she compromises the innocent, unsuspecting boy! Suppose——”
“Compromises him?”
“Suppose the boy loses his head and has to marry her! I’ll see him dead before I’ll see him make hamburg of his life as marriage made hamburg of mine!”
“You’ll only make it worse by opposing him! Do have a little sense!” The wife was too calloused to appreciate the insult to herself.
“I know! That’s the hard part. What can I do? I feel so helpless and weak and incompetent.”
“Why go to all this fuss? Why do anything at all about it? You’re an awful lot of trouble to yourself at times, John Forge! Let the whole thing work itself outIf you don’t attach any importance to it, neither will Nathan.”
“But he’s such a sickly, sentimental young fool! I can’t trust him! I can’t trust him, I say!”
Nevertheless, intent on seeing what manner of Circe was ruining his son’s life, Johnathan shed hat and coat and headed grimly for the parlor.
Hands in pockets, face glowering, Johnathan stood between the portières, waiting for the music to cease. Nathan was advised of his father’s appearance by a warning dig from Edith’s elbow. Miss Gardner sensed something amiss, stopped playing, turned around.
“This is my father,” said Nathan thickly. “Pa, this is Miss Gardner.”
Carol arose and moved over effusively, one hand on a hip, the other outstretched to Johnathan.
“Oh, Mr. Forge,” she gushed, “I’ve heard so much about you and so wanted to meet you——”
Johnathan did not remove his hands from his pockets. He addressed himself to his daughter.
“Edith, your mother wants you! Nathan, you and I have business to discuss. Miss Gardner will excuse us.”
Edith’s face flamed scarlet.
“But, dad, I’ve asked Miss Gardner to stay to supper——”
“I’m sorry! We’ve got other company to supper. Miss Gardner will excuse us from supper too.”
At the coarse insult, the righteously angered Gardner girl threw her chin in the air.
“I’m sorry I’m intruding,” she said. “I’ll be going.”
“Carol! I——” Nathan’s face was piteous with the humiliation of it.
“Nathaniel!” The father’s voice was ominous. “As soon as Miss Gardner’s gone, come to the kitchen. I’ve pressing business to discuss with you!”
The Gardner girl departed in high pique. The boy’s face wore an unhealthy look as he came into the kitchen. Edith was already sobbing on her mother’s sharp shoulder. Johnathan closed the door and spoke first.
IV
“You dared,” he cried hoarsely, “to bring her right here into this house! You dared!”
“Well,” demanded the son desperately, “what do you want me to do? Sneak up some back alley with her?”
The apparent impudence of the question was so flagrant that Johnathan’s temper exploded with a bang. Like lightning he ripped a hand from his pocket and struck Nathan in the head, an unexpected blow so fierce and hard it knocked the boy sprawling over a clothes basket.
“Pa!—I——”
“Shut up! Not a word out of you! There may be murder done in this house to-night! You’re not too big yet for me to thrash, even if you can line the help up against me in my own factory.”
Despite his white-hot rebellion Nathan saw a facial expression that made him fear his father. It cowed him. Beside, at heart he was still much of a boy and the habit of obedience was strong in him.
“Now,” declared Johnathan, “you’re going to listen to me. Edith! Anna! Go out! This is my affair and Nathan’s—alone!”
The terrified women withdrew. Father and son faced one another beneath that ghastly white light from the burner sticking out from the wall.
“You’ve been going with that girl—unbeknown to me—you’ve been seen with her!”
Johnathan began moving back the chairs dramatically.
“All right! Suppose I have! What of it?”
“Then you—you—admit it!”
“Yes. I admit it!”
“Unbeknown to me—against all I’ve told you—you’ve gone with her and now you admit it!”
“Do you want me to say I haven’t? Do you want me to lie to you?”
“I want you to keep your mouth shut! Don’t speak unless you’re spoken to!”
“But you did speak to me, didn’t you?”
Johnathan walked over deadly close.
“Nathan,” he said gutturally, “you’re my son—and murderis punishable by hanging. But I swear if you give me any more of your lip, I’m going to send you to the undertaker and I’m going to do it to-night!”
The boy backed away from his father against the wall, as far as he could retreat. He did not answer. He waited.
“Six or eight years ago,” went on Johnathan, when he saw he had browbeaten his boy into silence, “six or eight years ago I told you you were to have nothing to do with girls! Not until you were old enough to know your own mind, became of age and reached years of discretion. You understood me plainly enough then, didn’t you? What? You may answer! What?”
“Yes, sir!”
“And all down the years you’ve understood I insisted on obedience, didn’t you—right down until to-night?”
“Yes, sir!”
“But regardless of the fact that you knew my wishes and preferences in the matter perfectly, regardless of my warnings, my whippings, my admonitions—just like you did that picnic day with the Gridley girl—you’ve deliberately disobeyed me, haven’t you? You may answer me that too! What?”
“Yes, sir!”
“Then what’s the answer? What is it you deserve—deserve terribly?”
“Nothing, sir!”
“What?”
“I said ‘Nothing’!”
“Nothing!”
“Precisely! Nothing! You can’t lay down a law that runs contrary to human nature and expect obedience.”
“Nathan—I’m—going—to—kill you!”
The boy never batted an eyelid.
“No, father, you’re not going to kill me. And when you go talking so, I’ve cause to believe you’re not quite sane.”
It was the boy’s utter calm and perfect poise in a crucial situation, more than the girl question now, which was making Johnathan a man obsessed. He wanted Nathan to cringe and be afraid. Nathan was driven back against the wall but he did not cringe. Neither was he afraid. For the son had at last looked into his father’s weak, inflamed eyes and realized that he—the son—was the better man.
Johnathan’s lips moved ghastly before his voice would come.
“So I’m crazy, am I? And if I choose to murder you, what would you do?”
“I won’t hit you, father. But no one could criticize me for defending myself when any one, even my own father, announces he’s going to murder me.”
“You’ll defend yourself? How?”
“That remains to be seen.”
“God Almighty——”
“It strikes me, father—and this is as good a time to say it as any—it strikes me that there’s altogether too much dragging of God into our family affairs, and mouthing His name over and over is little short of blasphemy. Let’s leave God out of this and settle it between ourselves.”
On the son’s face was slight contempt. Johnathan moved deadly close. Forked lights were dancing in his eyes.
“I demand respect and obedience,” began Johnathan in a cracked, unnatural voice.
“Respect isn’t something that one person can demand of another, father. It’s something we earn by the way we conduct ourselves, day by day——”
Nathan never finished his sentence. Johnathan aimed a blow for his son’s jaw which, landed, would have split open the lad’s face. But this time Nathan saw the blow coming. And——
The step from terrible tragedy to divine comedy is oft but the space of a hair. Johnathan struck for his son’s jaw. But when his fist reached his son’s jaw, his son’s jaw wasn’t there. It had moved. With a boxer’s nicety of perception for distance, Nathan had whipped his head to the left.
The father’s fist went through plaster and lath halfway in to the elbow.
Anna Forge heard the dull smash and Johnathan’s bellow of agony. She burst into the kitchen. She beheld her husband for an instant with his hand and arm caught in a ragged aperture in the plaster. Off to one side Nathan stood with a tired, amused smile around his mouth.
But there was no amusement in the incident for Johnathan. He had broken two small bones in his right hand. And all further attempts at parental chastisement were adjournedfor that night in the greater calamity of broken bones.
“You go to bed!” he ordered his son hoarsely. “We’ll finish this in the morning.” The father’s face had been ashen with anger. Now it was white with agony, and his eyes were streaming tears.
Nathan pitied his father. But he shrugged his shoulders and went from the room. The pain from the broken knuckles was so great that Johnathan soon sobbed openly. Still, one could hardly expect the boy to leave his face around to intercept any such blow as Johnathan had purposed.
It was after ten o’clock when Nathan heard his father come in from the doctor’s. The boy had gone to his room to throw himself, fully dressed, upon his bed. He lay staring out through opened windows at the warm spring stars. Somewhere down to the south of town the frogs were piping faintly. Wonderful scents of awakening shrubs and sod wafted in at the window. The night was hushed, mystic. He was eighteen and in love.
He waited until the snarling voices of father and mother had become double-muffled by the closed door of their bedroom. He heard both father and mother retire. The hour slipped on into deeper night and utter nerve exhaustion brought sleep to his parents. Then he arose and tiptoed softly across the hall.
“Edie,” he whispered, “I’m going out.”
Edith sat up in bed.
“Where are you going, at this time of night?”
“Down to see Carol. I’ve got to square myself for the raw deal she got to-night.”
“How you going to get out?”
“Over the woodshed roof. And listen! If Pa or Ma get wise, hang something white in your window, so I won’t be climbing into a trap. It’d be just like him to hit me a crack from the dark before I could defend myself.”
“I’ll do it if to-morrow night you’ll keep watch while I sneak out!”
“Why do you want to sneak out?”
“To meet Tad MacHenry. He’s just wild about me. You oughta hear him. If Pa won’t lemme have him into the house or even speak to a feller during the day, why I’ll do it at night, that’s all.”
“But, Edie—it’s a little different—for a fellow to go out at night—than for a girl to—I——”
“Huh! Think you’re smart, don’t you? Think you’ve thought up a swell way to see Carrie, skinnin’ out over the woodshed room. Well, just for that, I’ll have you know that Mr. Turner, the hardware man, made a duplicate of the back-door key most two months ago. I been seein’ Tad two or three times a week since February, already.”
The flabbergasted brother managed to ask:
“Then why do you want me to let you out to-morrow night——”
“It’s my nerves, skinnin’ back into a dark house and thinkin’ I was walkin’ into Pa who’d missed me and was up waitin’ for me. Besides, I got a good scare one morning when I almost run into old Braithwaite, the milkman.”
“We’ll talk about that to-morrow, Edie. You’re taking pretty tall chances for a girl—going out all night with a fellow like Tad. He’s a pretty smooth pool player and with girls——”
“Oh, I guess I can take care of myself—and no thanks to Pa and Ma, either. Anyhow, you don’t need to sneak out over the woodshed roof. You can use my key. But for the Lord’s sake, don’t go sprawlin’ over anything in the kitchen or the jig’s up.”
Carol and Nathan had reached that stage of intimacy where a private whistle had been evolved in case Nathan elected to call Carol without advising her grandparents.
Nathan approached the Cuttner house now through silent, deserted streets. An arc light on the distant corner of Walnut and Pearl disclosed the length of the Cuttner side piazza ghostily. Nathan dodged into the shadow of a big maple before the house and cautiously gave the whistle.
Twice, three times he repeated it. No signs of life stirred within. Was the girl sleeping too soundly to hear? Or wasshe too incensed over the father’s conduct to want any more of the son?
As Nat stood waiting, wondering, hoping wistfully, with a sudden thump of his heart he saw the Cuttner front door give way and a figure slip through. This figure in silhouette turned and remained for a moment with face close to the door, latching it slowly and in perfect quiet. Then it tiptoed stealthily across the veranda, down the steps and Carol came into his arms. She had arisen from bed, dressed hastily and by no means completely, thrown up her hair in a quick knot at her neck and made the red cloak cover the exigencies of a hasty toilet. She giggled mawkishly as she met him. She too assayed this tryst on pique, against her grandfather. Old Archibald had declared “she’d got to cut out havin’ fellers traipsin’ into the house every night and twice a day on Sundays, that Forge yelp in particular. He didn’t have any too good a reputation about town on account of writing dirty-minded poetry.” But Carol, having heard Nathan’s side of the story, was inclined to give the lad the benefit of the doubt. Besides, it was spring and “she couldn’t sleep a wink, anyhow.” A walk in the night was very acceptable. Love laughed at locksmiths, didn’t it? And think how romantic it was, just like Romeo and Juliet. Taking care that no neighbors saw them, they went down Pearl Street hill, out along Adams Street, past the Catholic Cemetery and the pumping station, into world-old, moist, spring country.
It was one of those warm, sensuous nights which often visit New England in early April, with the snow almost gone excepting in far corners of sunless woods, with the ground drying and the incense of budding leaves and flowers surfeiting the shrine of Youth in the vast out-of-doors. The stars hung large and mellow and close. In another hour a half-made moon would find its way through the ephemeral stratas of upper haze. It would stay clear and fine until early morning.
It matters not where they walked; all the spring world through which they moved was wrapped into a soft, sweet dream. There were no distances. Distances were blurred, dissolved in fantasies of mauve and purple nothingness. Poor, distorted, twisted, perverted young love had mocked at locksmiths, indeed. But the singing, sighing spring nightthrew a mantle of sweet solitude over those distortions and perversions. The boy and the girl were alone, off under a starlit sky in the great out-of-doors. And earth was a garden spread in silver and bound around with impalpable walls of Heart’s Desire.
Nathan recounted what had ensued in his home following Carol’s departure. The girl was already acquainted with the sordid injustices done the boy.
“Served him right!” she snapped pertly. “Personally I think your father’s a little bit ‘off’!”
“Let’s forget it,” responded Nathan. “Let’s just talk about ourselves.” And he breathed a happy sigh. Parents and guardians were sleeping, like all the world about them. The night and its hours belonged to themselves.
“Carrie,” said the boy—thickly, softly—as they moved slowly through infinite reaches of happiness, deep-toned, voluptuous with the spell of springtime, “I want to tell you something.”
“Yes, Natie!”
The boy’s arm was about her warm, yielding, corsetless waist. Instinctively it tightened.
“Carrie—dear! I—love you!!”
He had never said it in plain words before. His heart leaped with the admission. The hour, the vastness of their freedom, acted upon his self-conscious ego as an opiate. He was the eternal lover.
The girl hung her head. She pressed her arm against the hand which held her tightly. Laughing nervously, she returned:
“I love you too, Natie, or I wouldn’t be here, would I? No girl would trust herself out with a fellow so, unless she loved him—very much. Isn’t that right?”
“You know you can trust me, dear.”
“I don’t know as I’m thinking very much about it, Natie. There’s a point where a girl doesn’t care, you know, when she loves a fellow very much.”
They covered a quarter mile in silence.
Far out beyond the Cogswell place was an abandoned pile of weather-grayed lumber. It was half hidden under brambles and wild grape. Nat and the girl reached this pile. Behind it the Cogswell wood lot reared like an enchanted forest, Stygian dark, peri haunted. Across the road, apasture of sumach and blueberry fell away to the lower shores of a choked and stagnant pond. The hour was too late for the frog chorus to pipe down in this bogland. But occasionally up across the pasture came a single plaintive note or the dull, lugubrious “gut-a-chunk” of a philosophic bullfrog. Once very far away they heard a whippoorwill.
They sat down on this pile of lumber, its weather-spiced fiber even more fragrant than the shrubs and sod around them. Darkness hid scarlet faces. Nathan took the girl on his lap. Their lips met.
Carol resigned herself with a happy quiver. She lay in his powerful young arms like a tired child and blinked at him owlishly in the weird moonlight.
“I think, Natie,” she whispered, “I think—I love you more—than I ever dreamed I could love any man—even back in A-higher.”
Her weight began to numb the boy’s limbs. Yet he could not disturb her; she was a wonderful burden.
Hairpins bothered where her head rested against his shoulder. With her left hand she pulled them out. She shook her riotous chestnut tresses free and they fell about her oval face like the bacchanal crown of a Sybarite. The lad bent his head and buried his lips in them.
She was his—his! Such a night would never come again—could never come again—because this was the first. No thrust-and-parry, drooling calf-talk; no bids for sex-interest here.
Youth, nature and night were stripped to their framework. For this were the worlds made and the constellations hung infinitely. For such was a soul given a maid and a man. For this had a cricket sung beneath these old gray boards for a hundred thousand years.
Again the boy’s lips found the girl’s. Her left arm crept up his right shoulder and around his neck. Their lips clung together.
“Oh, Natie!” she whispered. She had no strength.
“Let’s stroll back toward home,” the boy suggested thickly.
The old clock in the tower of the Universalist Church was striking three when they finally reached the Cuttner gate. In another hour the first streaks of warm dawn would bring the summit of Haystack Mountain into sharper silhouette.
“Just once more, dear boy,” the girl whispered as she stood close before him in the hush of somnambulistic morning.
Arms interlocked, once more Nathan kissed her.
She bade him good-by in a whisper. She tiptoed up and on to the veranda. The door yielded. The Cuttner household still slept. She waved him a comradely farewell and slipped noiselessly inside.
Nathan hurried through the deserted town and into Spring Street. There was no white signal in Edith’s window. The Forge house was weirdly quiet.
From the other side the partition he could hear his father’s lumberous snoring, when he gained his bedroom. He undressed and slipped into an unmade bed as a trillion birds were beginning to awaken and hold tuneful conversation in a hundred thousand tree tops.