CHAPTER XXSIDETRACKED

CHAPTER XXSIDETRACKED

The train had gone. Carol had gone. The town remained—the factory—work—memories.

Coat collar upturned, hands deep-thrust in trousers pockets, Nathan slopped through the puddles along down to the shop.

The office chanced to be empty as he entered. He looked around. It was difficult to believe that this was the same room in which just a few hours before he had held the girl he loved in his arms. It was difficult to credit that at this moment a train was bearing her away, farther and farther away; that there would be no more talks and walks and trysts; that she was gone, gone!

Then the reaction came. He passed a hideous day.

The rain stopped around five o’clock, though the trees dripped throughout the evening and pedestrians were grotesque through mist in which the arc lamps were nebulous.

His father was still more affable during supper, even boresomely jocular. He had turned a neat piece of business. Some day on bended knee—Johnathan was strong on the “bended knee” and “kissed hand” metaphor—his boy would thank him gratefully and humbly. It was with a vast relief that the man was able to wave his hand in generous permission when Nathan announced he was going for a walk. Why should not Nathan go for a walk? He, Johnathan, had walked much when a young man. And, thank God, there was no longer any need for nerve-racking surveillance to see that the son kept away from The Sex. Had not he, Johnathan, made certain the girl had left town by watching that departure from the interior of a fruit-store opposite the depot, that morning?

Nathan went out and roamed the streets of Paris. Itwas inevitable that after ten o’clock he should draw near the Cuttner premises.

In the shadow of the big tree at the gate he gazed at the darkened house. The lonely boy tried to imagine Carol still in the place, awaiting his whistle. Once he did whistle, for at heart he was much of a child. But he was whistling at the husk of a memory. The soul of the Cuttner homestead had departed.

In his loneliness that night, locked finally in his room, the boy’s emotions overpowered him and he sobbed. Johnathan, listening at the door, finally tiptoed back to his own room.

“He’s crying,” the man told his wife. “He’s sorry! But he’ll come to see that his father knew best after all!”

“Poor Nat!” sighed the mother. “He does go into things head-over-heels so—even a little passing acquaintance with a strange girl.”

“Those tears will bring him back to God,” opined Johnathan.

“Oh, bosh!” snapped Anna Forge. She rolled angrily as far from Johnathan as she could get and in this contorted position sighed at her own hard lot and fell asleep.

The remainder of that summer and autumn and the ensuing winter, when Nat turned twenty, was a time of comment-causing expansion for the box-shop.

The town had been left for Nathan—though a town with its soul gone out, like Archibald Cuttner’s house—and the factory had been left—and work—and memories. But the greatest of these was work. The boy threw himself into business with a febrile intensity which alarmed his father almost as much as it pleased him. Alarmed him because he could not exactly account for it. Also he had difficulty keeping up with his son in the matter of handling the business. This aroused his ire.

Nathan, as has been emphasized, had received an invaluable training under old Caleb Gridley. Moreover, after Carol left, in order to anesthetize his loneliness, the boy spent evening after evening with old Caleb. Sometimes thisqueer pair indulged their esthetic souls in poetry,—Cowper, Wordsworth, Keats, Pope, Browning; Old Caleb would sit in his big chair before the fire, slipper swinging, vest unbuttoned, iron-gray head nodding in approval, as the lad’s musical voice rose and fell in cadence of the finer selections.

More often they discussed the box-shop and its affairs. To old Caleb the boy brought his problems, his newly discovered short cuts, his dilemmas encountered with the idiosyncrasies of employees, his tangles of finance. And old Caleb, from a wealth of Yankee experience and common sense, encouraged the boy in the right places and delicately discouraged him when he might otherwise have “flown off at a tangent” and allowed his enthusiasms to go galloping.

Johnathan never knew of these consultations. He never dreamed that Caleb was really running his shop through his son; that Caleb subsequently knew more about the folding-box business than Johnathan himself. The latter only knew that Nathan “did things” and then “consulted him” afterward. That the “things” which Nathan did reduced expenses, increased production, sold goods, brought money from delinquent creditors, cut small figure with the father. Somehow his boy had no patience when time after time the father expressed a wish to “go into conference.” There were two great joys in being a business man, for Johnathan. One was opening the morning mail. The other was “going into conference.”

The fact of the matter was that Nathan had deftly taken the management of the business out of his father’s hands. There was nothing left for Johnathan to do. There was no one to “boss.” He worried a lot about it.

This worry often broke out in open rebellion. At such times, father and son quarreled. These quarrels had chiefly to do with supplies. One day Nathan ordered a new cutter-knife. It cost twenty-eight dollars. The father’s contention was that while Nathan might have had to get the knife quickly to maintain production, they had not “gone into conference” about it first.

“But you were in Baldwinsville that day—all day!” snapped Nathan. “How could I consult you when you weren’t here to consult?”

“You could have awaited my return!”

“And shut down the cutter to do it—send Partridge home—make him lose a day’s wages and the business a matter of a hundred and seventy-five dollars—just to ask you if I could buy a new knife which you would have had to consent to, anyway? Where’s the sense in that?”

The economics of the thing were swept aside by Johnathan. He clung doggedly to the contention that they had not “gone into conference” about it first. Thereupon he passed the rest of that day evolving a very elaborate order system. With a needle-pointed pencil and a ruler he laid out an order form. He took it up to the local print shop and ordered twenty thousand blanks printed and finished off in pads. Prominently upon the face of each was the line in big type: “No orders valid without the signature of J. H. Forge, Pres.” The bill for the printing was seventy-eight dollars. The fallacy of the system was that Johnathan had to be on hand to sign a blank every time the business required anything from a bottle of paste to the use of a storehouse for goods waiting shipment. This grew to be a nuisance. Nathan began to “countersign” the orders, as he was “on the job” twelve hours a day. The fourth week the blanks were discarded,—as order forms. The second month the office girls were using them for scratch paper. But they cost seventy-eight dollars.

It was Nathan who made a hurried trip to Burlington one Saturday afternoon and landed the Cudworth and Halstead business for candy cartons. It was Nathan who cleverly “tied up” the output of the Cobb City Pressed Board Mills and diverted it to the Forge plant when prices shot up after the depression of 1907. It was Nathan who suggested scrapping all their old presses and putting in the latest type of power machines then being evolved by a Philadelphia firm. To finance this radical move, it was Nathan who suggested that they incorporate the box-shop and put out fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of its preferred stock. And it was Nathan who, under the clandestine tutelage of old Caleb, engineered that organization and got the money.

Against all these departures Johnathan fought tooth and claw,—all but the procuring of new money. The size to which his thumb-nail business had grown began to frighten him. More and more he wanted to “go into conference.” But Nathan, the load of the organization on his enthusiasticyoung shoulders, formed the habit of humorously responding, “I’m too busy doing things to talk about them!” That angered Johnathan. It pushed him back into a slough of self-pity, outraged dignity and mocked parental authority. All but the procuring of new capital, I say. It was a vast responsibility, being accountable for new capital. It also worried Johnathan mightily. But it was nevertheless a pleasant sort of worry. He inflated in his own esteem. He walked about Paris as a Somebody. He gave less and less time to the “practical” affairs of the company. He no longer “paid off personally” on Saturday afternoons. Instead, he appeared for the first time in tailored clothes, kept banker’s hours and saw himself as a Capitalist.

A stenographer had long ago been hired to ameliorate the time-consuming process of punching out correspondence with one finger on the old blind calligraph. Johnathan had a bell installed in a “private” office to push when he wanted this girl. He pushed it on an average of twice an hour. He wrote letters soliciting business from firms too far away to permit of freight rates leaving any profit. He answered advertisements for catalogs in the back ofSystem MagazineandThe Modern Factory. Of course important letters about supplies and shipments which Nathan had dictated hurriedly during noon hour, were sidetracked for these dictations by Johnathan. Wasn’t he president and treasurer?

Frequently, he made a “tour of inspection” through his factory, especially after the addition was built, the principal feature of these trips being to criticize methods which Nathan had instigated, pick up bits of cardboard and string from the floor on the contention that the only way to get rich is to watch the waste boxes, and left a long list of orders behind which were never executed, which the employees laughed at, and which Johnathan himself forgot within five minutes after returning to his swivel chair.

Of course, all this expansion and feverish industrial activity on Nathan’s part had but one basis: The day he was twenty-one he was going to marry Carol and he proposed to have a business sizable enough and profitable enough toclothe her in purple and fine linen and make her a Somebody because she was the wife of Nathan Forge.

The first month after Carol’s departure, and well along into the autumn, bulky epistles arrived for Nathan on an average of twice a week. Nathan had at once appealed to me to act as clearing house for this correspondence, and I therefore unwittingly kept a finger on the pulse of the courtship.

Johnathan, with small-bored shrewdness, had given orders at the local postoffice that all Nathan’s mail was to be saved and delivered to himself. And as no letters with Ohio postmarkings or addressed in feminine penmanship ever arrived in those following months, Jonathan knew the “affair” was over, and, praise the Almighty, “over” successfully. Carol’s letters came to me in a double envelope, with Nat’s name inside. When he wasn’t at Caleb Gridley’s in the evening, he was at my house using my desk and typewriter answering them.

Something of the old intimacy between Nat and myself was restored after Carol’s departure. I had meanwhile finished high school but been obliged to take a job in the local newspaper office. After work, or on Sundays, we fell into the habit of taking long walks about the town and countryside, while the boy raved to me of the undying affection in Carol’s letters or his increasing successes at the factory.

Carol, it appeared, had recovered her aplomb upon her return to A-higher. Her letters were full of minute accountings of her time and activities and how she was “getting her clothes ready” and what house in town Nathan should try to procure for their habitation, and what a boor and a bear Johnathan was, and what a trial and a nuisance he must be to the son generally.

And yet, through all of that twentieth year, and especially throughout the summer, there were days and nights when the boy’s loneliness almost crazed him.

Through the town he wandered, bareheaded beneath the stars. There was one ballad he and Carol had sung over and over until the lad knew the words from memory. Nat hummed the tune to himself on many starlit nights when he walked out toward the old lumber pile on the Gilberts Mills road:

“I am writing to you, Molly, while the fair moon softly shines,As it did the night before you went away;When it shone in all its gloryAnd I told Love’s old, old storyAnd you promised you’d return and wed some day.”

“I am writing to you, Molly, while the fair moon softly shines,As it did the night before you went away;When it shone in all its gloryAnd I told Love’s old, old storyAnd you promised you’d return and wed some day.”

“I am writing to you, Molly, while the fair moon softly shines,As it did the night before you went away;When it shone in all its gloryAnd I told Love’s old, old storyAnd you promised you’d return and wed some day.”

“I am writing to you, Molly, while the fair moon softly shines,

As it did the night before you went away;

When it shone in all its glory

And I told Love’s old, old story

And you promised you’d return and wed some day.”

It was a sickly, sentimental thing, being sung in all the picture shows and Wednesday-evening courting hours. But it was the second verse which probed the boy’s heart and always brought tears to his eyes:

“All alone I’m roaming, Molly,Down the dear old village lane,To the wildwood where we strolled with hearts so light;In the old church they are singing,Fondest memories it’s bringingOf the girl I love, so far away, to-night.Some folks laugh and call it follyWhen I tell them you’re still true,But you love me, don’t you, Molly?Say you’re coming back, please do!”

“All alone I’m roaming, Molly,Down the dear old village lane,To the wildwood where we strolled with hearts so light;In the old church they are singing,Fondest memories it’s bringingOf the girl I love, so far away, to-night.Some folks laugh and call it follyWhen I tell them you’re still true,But you love me, don’t you, Molly?Say you’re coming back, please do!”

“All alone I’m roaming, Molly,Down the dear old village lane,To the wildwood where we strolled with hearts so light;In the old church they are singing,Fondest memories it’s bringingOf the girl I love, so far away, to-night.Some folks laugh and call it follyWhen I tell them you’re still true,But you love me, don’t you, Molly?Say you’re coming back, please do!”

“All alone I’m roaming, Molly,

Down the dear old village lane,

To the wildwood where we strolled with hearts so light;

In the old church they are singing,

Fondest memories it’s bringing

Of the girl I love, so far away, to-night.

Some folks laugh and call it folly

When I tell them you’re still true,

But you love me, don’t you, Molly?

Say you’re coming back, please do!”

The boy forgot all about his poetry, unless it was to try putting his loneliness and heart-hunger in words. Yet somehow he could not publish these. He filed them away with Carol’s letters. He lived, moved, had his being, in the box-shop.

Johnathan had been elected president and treasurer, Charley Newton who had left an office job at the process works to become the Forge bookkeeper (and learn how to thwart Johnathan making entries in his books and getting them awry), had been elected vice-president. Joe Partridge, who had arisen to the prominence of foreman, was clerk of the corporation, though Lawyer Bob Hentley did the secretarial work and all Joel had to do was sign on the dotted line. Nathan, not being of age, could not be an officer. His large capacity was “General Superintendent.”

As money flowed into the firm’s coffers, the prospects of the Forge family started looking up.

Johnathan began buying suits of clothes, evolved a propensity for bat neckties and learned to smoke cigars. He was less conscientious about his attendance at church andtook long trips off “to keep the trade in line.” Invariably he found, however, that his son had contrived to do this by letter. When his “trade” began discussing deals and discounts of which Johnathan had never heard, it made him feel rather foolish and always angry. He returned grimly determined that he was going to run his own business or know the reason why. But before the first day was ended, he had become so engrossed in some new office contrivance or new set of forms, that he forgot larger problems,—or some quarrel with his boy sent him off to walk the streets for hours and pity himself. The matter of running his own business sagged until it was time for another venture at “keeping the trade in line.”

The Forges left the Spring Street house and bought the old Longstreet residence on Vermont Avenue. Whereupon Mrs. Forge and Edith began to “put on style” and rise to the occasion generally. The womenfolk of a prominent manufacturer had to keep up appearances. Charge accounts were opened at the leading stores and for the first time in her mortal existence Mrs. Forge’s appetite for chocolate caramels was satiated,—the kind with nuts in them.

Nathan was to become twenty-one on the second day of December. I knew, as his confidant, that the original plan was a wedding between Carol and himself on the ensuing Christmas. But as that late summer and autumn dragged along toward the first frosts, I grew increasingly worried. The cause of my perturbation was Carol’s correspondence.

The first letters, written in the initial pangs of separation, had come to hand twice a week,—or as often as Nat’s reply allowed. From September to the first week in November, no letter whatever came for Nat. Then an epistle arrived which the boy tore open and read with an avidity that was piteous. She had been ill. She would write at greater length when she felt better.

“I’d find an excuse to make a road trip, Bill, and go out and see her,” he told me. “But, hang it all, I can’t leave the factory. Dad would have things so snarled up whenI got back I’d be six months getting the débris cleared away and things going smoothly again.”

Worry weighed the boy down. He grew increasingly irritable and somewhat surly. For hours at a time Johnathan would sit and figure. He would prove to Nathan that on some order made and shipped six months before they had lost two mills of a cent on every carton. Thereupon he declared that Nat’s obstreperousness was heading his father into bankruptcy. (Johnathan never spent hours figuring orders where the firm had cleaned up handsomely and absorbed the losses on lesser ventures.) He would arise in the middle of the night and go down to the shop—after the fires had been lighted in late October—to see if old Mike Hennessy, the watchman, was sleeping on the job. He caught him one night fortifying his courage with a short flat bottle and discharged him on the spot. The help came down next morning to find the fires out. It was noon before the plant was again up to standard. Father and son fought out the question of “hiring and firing” in front of the help—which is an extremely effective method for maintaining respect among employees for the principals in any business—and all this sapped Nat’s vitality.

“Thank God you’re twenty-one in a few weeks and my responsibility is ended!” the father swore as he paced the expansive dining room of the sepulchral Longstreet residence. His eyes were wild and his hair was rumpled. He walked with his hands in his pockets and occasionally grabbed up a book or magazine to hurl at his son whose retorts were always so apt, effective and unanswerable that Johnathan had to vent his feelings in action somehow.

Then the night when Nathan was twenty-one came,—the epochal date when he was free at last.

It was marked by two episodes. The quarrel over Edith and the newspaper clipping I was called upon to give my friend.

It was a Saturday night and Edith was taking part in a church concert on the morrow. She had left the house ostensibly to “practice her part” at the home of a friend. Instead of which she had met the Nelson boy and inquiry developed, quite accidentally, that she had “skipped off” to a dance in Wickford.

Nathan had taken his sister’s part. The boy, in the exaltationof his majority, had dropped an unfortunate remark:

“You’ll be just about as successful in thwarting Edie as you’ve been successful in thwarting me. You think you busted up my engagement to Carol, dad. But you didn’t. Carol went away simply to get her clothes ready. And you might as well know now as any time that I’m marrying her on Christmas day—in exactly three weeks!”

Johnathan had remained rather wild-eyed for a moment. Then he found his voice and started cursing. Not content with cursing, he waited until his son’s back was turned and then dealt him a blow in the shoulder which sent Nathan smashing against the table. He knocked off crockery with a crash and sent a coffee pot into the front of a near-by china closet.

Mrs. Forge came running, and as usual, joined in the altercation. Johnathan’s cursing included his wife. His wife turned livid at a particularly vile epithet and hurled a plate. Johnathan dodged the plate and it went neatly through a pane of heavy glass. Then Johnathan picked up a chair and threw it. It hit the dome above the dining table and dropped its glass in a shower, leaving the brass shell swaying ludicrously. Mrs. Forge shrieked and Johnathan bellowed.

On the night of the son’s majority a pleasant time was had by all!

Nathan was unhurt. He walked from the room, got his hat and coat. He passed out the front door and left his father and mother having their last quarrel,—while he was an occupant of their house. He came to me.

“Any mail, Bill?” he asked anxiously.

I was punching away at my typewriter in the sitting room. I recollect that I took a long moment to fill my pipe and relight it before I answered. But there was no way out—for me. I had been working, trying subconsciously to evolve a way to break the news to my friend gently.

“No, Nat,” I said at length. “There’s no mail come for you—directly. But mother gave me a newspaper when I came home—an Ohio paper, addressed to me.”

“A paper!” cried the boy. “What’s the big idea?”

There was no way out, indeed. The paper was lying on my desk. An item in the “Social and Personal” column was marked in red ink. I handed it across.

COLE-GARDNER

A pretty home wedding was solemnized at the residence of Mr. and Mrs. P. H. Gardner on Temple Street last evening, when Mr. Gardner’s daughter Carol was joined in matrimony to Mr. Blodgett Cole, son of Mr. and Mrs. Roger Cole of Union Place. The marriage was the outcome of a boy-and-girl romance begun in the graded schools of East Gilead, when ...

I don’t think my friend ever quite finished reading that item. The paper dropped through his fingers, through his knees, down with a sharp plop! to the carpet.

“Bill!” cried my friend hoarsely, “Bill!”

“Hard luck, Nat!” was all I could say. “But don’t you let it upset you. If she’s that kind of girl, she wasn’t worth waiting for in the first place.”

The boy stumbled down our front steps. By the time I had spoken to my mother and secured hat and coat, he had disappeared.

Where he went no one knows. Anyhow, it doesn’t matter. Around eight o’clock he appeared at the box-shop. He unlocked the office door and groped his way inside.

The office had expanded in keeping with the rest of the plant. It now bore little resemblance to the room in which Nat had kept bitter-sweet rendezvous with Carol in those Memory Nights. A private office—two of them, because Johnathan had insisted upon one—had been constructed off on the right. And Nathan stumbled into his own, leaving all doors open and lamps burning. He sank in his swivel chair and his forehead went down in his arms.

“Hello!” called a cheery voice.

Nathan raised his head. His face was the countenance of a middle-aged man.

A girl was standing in the doorway. She was hatless, despite the winter chill. She wore an oversized cloak of heavy green plaid. The sleeves were too long and had been folded back. The cloak was unbuttoned; two of the buttons, in fact, were missing, and a third was due to fall off momentarily. Underneath the cloak was a plain white shirtwaistwith an inappropriate low neck. But her hair was done very prettily and her face was flushed with health and the nip of the night wind. It was Milly Richards.

“Hello!” returned Nat lifelessly.

“Why! What’s the matter, Nathan? You’re sick!”

The boy’s hollow eyes fastened upon the girl. Deliberately he looked down her figure as she stood in the doorway, from the pile of brown hair with its marcelled wave to the curve of her neck, the slightly heaving bosom, the ample torso and hips, the stolid ankles.

“Shut the door!” said Nathan.

Milly was puzzled, not a little alarmed. But she shut the door. Across to a chair she moved. Keeping her eyes intently upon him, she raised her forearms, with locked hands, and rested them across the corner of the intervening desk top.

The lad continued to gaze upon her. The color of his lips was gruesome. No word was spoken.

The clock on the wall showed seventeen minutes past eight. The night wind blew some papers from Charley Newton’s desk in the outer office where the door had been left open.

“Nathan! Something horrible’s happened! Can’t you tell me?”

“Milly! You know how much trouble father and I are always having around the shop, here?”

“Yes! ’Course I know! So does everybody!”

“It’s reached the point, Milly, where I can’t stand it any longer.”

“All the fellers and girls would follow you out to a person, if you was to ask ’em.”

“I’m especially thinking—of—home. You can imagine, can’t you, that if dad quarrels with me here, he acts the same way at home. Well, he does, anyhow! And I’m sick of it!”

“Then I should think you’d get out and,” she dropped her eyes, adding unsteadily, “get a home o’ your own.”

“I—haven’t—any one—to do it with, Milly.”

His face returned to his arms. “I thought I had, but I haven’t.”

“You thought you had?”

“I thought I had, yes. But the girl went off and married somebody else. I just learned it—to-night!”

“She couldn’t have loved you very much to do that, Nathan.”

“I suppose not! No!”

“I’m—I’m—awful sorry, Nathan! Sorry for you! If there was anything I could do, you know I’d do it, don’t you?”

He raised his face again. His hands wandered around the desk top, as though groping blindly.

Fog! Fog! Or perhaps he was searching for something.

“Milly, I feel like the loneliest chap on God’s earth!” Two huge tears brimmed in his hot, hard eyes, blurred his sight, zigzagged down his haggard, unshaven cheeks. He arose, walked to the window. The girl’s eyes were riveted on him. When he came close to her, she only tilted her head back to look up into his face.

“Nathan,” she lisped, “is there anything I could do to make you—happy?”

It was her soft, ample bosom which he saw heaving that brought that constricted feeling across his own chest and words to his lips.

“I don’t know, Milly. Oh, God, I’m tired—tired!”

Milly found the strength to rise. She had seen Nat enter the office and followed to tell him there had been a mistake of ten cents in her weekly envelope. But it was plain she had come instead to encounter, all unwittingly,herAmethyst Moment.

She made an appealing picture, standing before the lad with wistful solicitation on her face,—half-frightened, not knowing whether to stay or to flee, held half by morbid curiosity, half by the titanic possibilities of the drama. Everything about her was cheap, but was that not because she had been denied something better—like the boy himself?

Hardly knowing that he did so, groping, the scion of the House of Forge raised his left hand. His fingers touched the fabric of her cloak sleeve.

He did not especially want Milly. He wanted Woman—the solacing, maternal spirit—wanted it horribly in one of life’s great disappointments. Milly at the moment only stood for Woman.

The girl did not shrink from his touch. She stood motionless, waiting, with the blood dying out of her face.

The boy’s other hand found the girl’s other arm. Both his hands crept up toward her ample shoulders.

Nathan took old Jake Richards’ daughter to his heart. And old Jake Richards’ daughter responded somehow, frightened out of her wits.

It was twenty-one minutes past eight. The town clerk’s office would be open until nine o’clock. The day was Saturday and taxpayers came in to settle their assessments and water rents. There was time, then, that night, to get a marriage license.

Nathan had no heart to take his hideous disappointment back to a home where father and mother were still “at it.” Forever “at it.”

Milly thought it a great lark. On the way uptown her head was swimming with the realization.

“I guess Pa and Maw ain’t got the stunning of their lives coming when they see I’ve copped off the boss!”

One night back over the years, Nathan and I had idled down the Green River in the starlight, and the poet had dreamed dreams of his wedding day—fantastic, vague, exotic—the wonder noon of the future all blurred in autumn lights, laughter, love and flowers.

Fred Babcock, real-estate agent and justice of the peace, in the Norwalk Block, tucked a small brown flask hurriedly in the bottom drawer of his desk when he heard somebody coming up the stairs. He threw his “chew” in the stove and nipped his finger on the hot iron door. He was shaking the smarting hand and swearing when Nathan appeared in the doorway. There was some one behind him.

“Mr. Babcock,” asked the boy in a strained voice, “wonder if I could get you to perform a m-m-marriage?”

“Whose?” gaped Fred.

“Mine! Mine and Miss Richards.”

Fred looked from one to the other blankly.

“Well, of course, if it’s bad as that,” he assented. “Comein! Gawd! I ain’t hitched nobody for so long b’darned if I know where to look for the book.”

Milly clung to Nathan frightenedly. Her other hand held her cloak together, for the dangling button had ceased its dangling somewhere en route.

Fred found the book in an empty cigar box that had fallen upon a pile of old overshoes and fishing tackle.

“B’darn! We gotta have a witness!” he declared. “An’ you gotcha license all proper, aincher?”

Nathan could produce a license but not a witness. Fred departed to “scare one out.” He was pleased with the prospect of making five dollars so easily to top off the week,—just like “picking it up in the street.”

While Fred was absent, Milly and Nathan sat stiffly. Dimly in the grief-stunned boy’s mind was a thought that by this he was going Carol one better! Wait until she heard! Then too, he never would have to go back to his father and mother. Milly was all right! As good as the run of ’em! She was The Sex anyhow and had proved that she loved him. Had she not stayed at work during the strike? Had she not gone uptown once and brought him down a basket of supper, unasked?

Fred came back with a colored man in tow,—old Ezra Hassock, janitor for a half-dozen Main Street blocks and tender of their nocturnal fires. He wore white overalls and a dented felt hat. The hat had cobwebs on it, and his hands hung from the length of his arms like smoked hams.

“Well, stand up, and we’ll have the agony over,” was the cheery way the justice of the peace phrased it. “Gotta ring?”

“Yes,” said Nathan thickly. “I bought one when we came across the square just now.”

“Well, grab her left lunch-hook and hang on,” was Fred’s equally jovial way of directing the ceremonies. “You, Ezra! Take the cotton battin’ out your ears and look like a witness!”

“Ain’t got no cotton battin’ in mah ears!” rejoined Ezra. Thereat all present laughed. It was an excellent joke.

“In the name of God, Amen!”

A knife ran into Nathan’s heart. Where was Carol this moment and what was she doing? The paper must have been mailed a week before—she had been several days on her honeymoon already.... Carol had wanted him to get theHarvey house in Pearl Street.... Milly’s hand was very sweaty and hard, calloused from the pasting of many boxes.... Where had old Ezra got so many cobwebs on his hat?... Where would he take Milly that first night?... Where was Carol and what——

“Yes! I mean ‘I do!’” he answered anent keeping, loving and cherishing this female in sickness and in health and all the rest of it, whatever it was.

He was dimly conscious that he was trying to get the ring on Milly’s finger; it didn’t fit half so well as it had in the jewelry store. Ezra was grinning—showing ivories like an enameled picket-fence—it was fourteen minutes after nine o’clock—Carol had said she wanted the living room furnished in Mission——

“... I now therefore pronounce you man and wife and may God bless your union, Amen! And it’ll cost you five bucks.”

Nathan and Milly came down into Main Street. It looked quite like Main Street on a hundred other Saturday nights.

“Where’ll we go?” asked Milly, as they paused on the top step in front of the Norwalk Block so as not to be jostled by the grocery-bill-paying, Sunday-meat-buying crowd. She clung to Nathan’s arm with one hand and in the other held her marriage certificate as though she didn’t know what to do with it. Which she didn’t.

“I dunno!” said Nathan vaguely. “What do you want to do?”

“I want to go home and tell Ma and the kids,” returned Milly honestly. “To think when I left the house to-night, I was coming backmarried! My Gawd!”

They descended the four stone steps and were obliterated at once in the serpentine sidewalk traffic of hopeless mediocrity.

BOOK TWO

SUNSHINE GLORIOUS

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