THE FOG

By William Dudley Pelley

THE GREATER GLORY

THE FOG

DRAG

THE FOG

A NOVEL

BY

WILLIAM DUDLEY PELLEY

BOSTON

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY

1925

Copyright, 1921,

By Little, Brown, and Company.

────

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

TO MY OWN BOY AT EIGHTEEN

“Dandelion Farm,”

Passumpsic, Vt.

June 23, 1921.

CONTENTS

BOOK ONE

DRIZZLE AND MURK

BOOK TWO

SUNSHINE GLORIOUS

BOOK ONE

DRIZZLE AND MURK

THE FOG

CHAPTER I
THIS FRECKLED WORLD

I

I straddled, precariously balanced, atop a seven-foot fence marking the northern boundary of the little Vermont school yard. As this was the opening morning for the September term, I had left home painfully dressed in the full armor of country-village scholarship. Already the puckering-string of my blouse was broken and my new dollar-and-a-quarter boots were hot upon my feet. No matter! Noisily on the philosophical old boards I whacked a barrel stave. I had aspirations toward making the lower world of pinafored humanity remark nervously of my valor and horrible propensities for breaking an arm. But I did not address that pinafored world directly. No such aplomb is possessed by a youngster of eight.

A new boy edged his way into the yard twenty minutes before the bell rang and moved along my fence. He concentrated upon tallying its knotholes. I noted that he was a stranger and immediately took his measure.

“’Lo!” I greeted him.

“’Lo, yourself!” he responded.

“What’s yer name?” I demanded, piqued.

“Name, name, Puddin’ Tame; ask me again and I’ll tell yer the same!”

“Aw, don’t get fresh!” I advised him. “I could ‘do’ you with one hand tied behind me—if I wanted.”

“My ma licks me if I fight—when I’m dressed up. If it wasn’t for that, you couldn’t.” And the new boy looked at me gladiatorially, expecting me to believe this bravado without a question.

Incipient hostilities were halted by the appearance—or condition—of the new boy’s face. Twenty-four years have passed since that morning. I have beheld many boys. Yet never since a freshly molded clay Adam was pronounced a reasonably passable job and stood against the nearest rock to dry has one human being looked into the features of another, regardless of age, and beheld such freckles.

I once knew a boy who had thirty-one thousand seven hundred and eighty-four freckles, not counting those behind his ears or a few odd thousand remaining, sprinkled across the back of his neck. The average boy manages to worry along with eighteen or twenty thousand. But the infinity of freckles upon that new boy’s face was beyond all computation. The Lord might have known the number of hairs in his head, but there He stopped. It would have been hopeless even to try to separate those freckles so to compute them, anyhow.

“Aw, you don’t need to tell me your old name,” I condescended. “You’re one o’ them Forges that’s moved up to Brown’s.”

“Howja guess?”

“I know by your freckles. I heard Lawyer Campbell call your folks ‘them freckled Forges.’ Your ma’s got ’em and so’s your pa. You’ve all got ’em—like measles ’n itch.”

Instead of growing more bellicose, the new boy became apologetic.

“Yeah, but they ain’t got so many as me—Ma and Pa ain’t. Anyhow, I can’t help it. I got a torpedoed liver.”

“You gotta what?”

“A torpedoed liver!”

“What’s a torpedoed liver?”

He tried to explain. In the light of a maturer understanding, I assume he meant a torpid liver. But I was little wiser than he that morning, so one liver was as good as another.

“Year, but they ain’t got so many as me—Ma and Pa leaves. Ma says all us Forges has got too much iron in our blood and it makes us rust all over, outside.”

“Iron in yer blood!” I looked at the Forge boy incredulously. Was he spoofing me?

“Howja know?” I demanded. “Can yer hear it clank together?”

I had a mental suggestion of sundry billets and bars of cold steel, wagon springs, old horseshoes, machine castings circulating through the new boy’s system and wondered how he managed it.

“Naw,” he went on. “’Tain’t that kind of iron. It’s all melted or ground up to powder or sumpin’. I ain’t never heard it make no noise, anyway.”

“Maybe we ain’t got no floatin’ iron in our family,” I defended, “but my Aunt Lucy’s got sumpin’ just as good and horrible. She’s got floatin’ ribs, three of ’em. Betcha you ain’t got nobody in your old family with floatin’ ribs.”

It was now the small Forge boy’s turn to show incredulity. And momentarily I exulted.

“But ribs don’t float,” he contradicted. “They’re hitched to yer backbone and run around yer stomach like hoops. I seen a pitcher of a man with his skin off, once. If they was loose and floated, you’d be all flat and hollow and sort of pushed in across your chest.”

“Is that so?” I demanded hotly. “Maybe you know my Aunt Lucy’s shape better’n me!” This stranger asked me to believe he had iron circulating in his system and yet doubted that mere bones could follow suit.

It was true that Aunt Lucy’s irresponsible ribs had given me much perplexity as to just where they floated, or where they would go if they suddenly lost their buoyancy and sank. Still, I knew my claim had a basis in fact. I had overheard too many first-hand testimonials of her abstruse condition from the fearfully and wonderfully unjointed lady herself.

Before I could conjure up more human freaks, however, related to me by facetious Nature, with a diplomacy which has always been charming, young Nathan Forge introduced a new subject.

“We just moved to Brown’s place last month from Gilberts Mills,” he declared. “And we got five bedrooms and a vegetable cellar and cockroaches an’ everything. An’ I got a dog named Ned that don’t get sick when he catches skunks. He caught seven one autumn and brung ’em to me. But one wasn’t shook quite dead yet, and I had to stay in bed a week while they buried my clothes. Pa wanted to bury me, too, but Ma wouldn’t stand for it!”

“That’s nothin’,” I countered. “We gotta cat at our house named Apron-strings ’cause she’s always behind you when you turn ’round. An’ all you gotta do to make her have kittens is watch her! My father says, ‘Look twice at that dratted little beast and she has young all over the place’ He’s goin’ to dig a special well to drown ’em in when he gets time. He said so.”

“We got two wells over to our house already,” Nat retorted,—“one to drink from and one to fish things out of. Campbell’s pants is down the last one.”

“Campbell’s pants!”

“My father said so. Lawyer Campbell come over the day we moved in, to see about the hay. He’d bought some new pants to the Center and had ’em in a bundle. On the way home he missed ’em. When Pa heard, he says to Ma: ‘He might look down that well in the south lot! I’ve fished everything out of it but money!’ he says. ‘Bet I could find Campbell’s pants if I fished long enough.’”

Evidently the Forges occupied exceptionally interesting premises. I congratulated myself that I had been discreet about punching Nat’s jaw. I would cultivate this new boy.

Not once during all this, however, had we looked each other straight in the eye. That is another unethical thing between boys of eight. We went through gyrations with hands, legs, elastic torsos. We kicked at stones in the sand. We pried them loose and threw them. But our faces were always averted.

“Got any brothers or sisters?” I finally demanded.

“Yeah. I gotta sister.”

“Pshaw! How old?”

“Four. But she ain’t no good—only to tag ’round and squeal to Ma when I skip my chores.”

“Sure. I know. Girls always spoil everything. Ain’t it awful?”

“Awful’s no name for it,” agreed Nathan.

II

I learned other things of Nathan regarding his family that morning and in the day and week ensuing.

The Forges had a cow, a grievance against the selectmen, a hard time to get along and a mortgage. Nathan’s mother was five years older than his father. The latter had once aspired to be a minister. A premature marriage, however, had sent him to the humbler calling of tapping and heeling shoes. Along with farming in a small way to help out with domestic expenses, Johnathan Forge now proposed to cobble shoes at his new residence in East Foxboro.

On his father’s side the boy’s ancestry was English,—that bigoted, Quilpish English which contends that a man’s wife and children are his personal chattels and foot-scrapers. A neurasthenic Yankee wife resented the absurdity but was too weak-charactered to do much more than scream about it. It puzzled me in those days to hear him orate to my father about “every man’s house being his castle.” I could never discern evidences of a “castle” about the flat-roofed, drab-colored, hillside home for which Johnathan had paid the Browns five hundred dollars. Nevertheless, he ran his castle as he pleased, and all the neighbors could do was shrug their individual and collective shoulders and mind their own business.

Johnathan was a short man with watery blue eyes. And his mouth never for a moment failed to register that the world “had it in” for him. His antidote for this mundane conspiracy was Religion. Religion completely strangled his sense of humor—if he ever possessed a sense of humor—and kept it strangled. As his children approached maturity, he went to and fro in the earth and moved up and down in it with a stuffed club in his clothes always loaded to the point of explosion, fearing that some one was treading on his authority. He took his religion seriously, Johnathan did, and it gave him a sickening amount of trouble.

Nathan’s mother also took life and religion seriously. There was no other way to take it, with Johnathan for a husband. As Johnathan aged, he became stout. As Anna Forge aged, she became thin. But as I first recall her in those East Foxboro days, she was a fairly well-rounded woman with terribly work-reddened hands. She too had weak eyes,—greenish, pin-pointed eyes. Her neurasthenia and hard work ultimately “wore the flesh all off her”, and soon she had contracted the nervous affliction of a twitching face. She did her work in the hardest manner possible and was always tired. She had a sallow, jaundiced complexion and it flavored her days and nights.

Nat’s little sister Edith was hardly more than a baby. Yet even at four years she had her father’s petulant mouth and her mother’s whine.

Nathan bore no resemblance to either parent. He was just a freckle-faced, snub-nosed, wonder-eyed, good-natured, little country boy. Quickly I found myself attached to him and he became my chum.

With all due respect to ninety-nine per cent. of that specific sect who are emphatically all that the Forges were not, the latter were Methodists. They were more. The village had it they were “shouting Methodists.”

I knew well enough what a regular Methodist was. My own father and mother were Methodists. But a “shoutin’ Methodist” was a novelty and a mystery. I flew wildly from the Forge shop one Saturday morning when, after watching Johnathan at work on a pair of child’s shoes for a time, I summoned the nerve to ask:

“Say, Mr. Forge, tell me sumpin’, will you? I’m a brother Methodist and all like that, you know, but not a ‘shoutin’ Methodist’, like all the village calls you, and, well, I’d like to know what a ‘shoutin’ Methodist’ is. Would you mind shoutin’ for me a coupla times so’s I can see how you do it—and why?”

Johnathan not only shouted for me but he threw something at me for good measure. I believe it was the nearest old shoe. Both of which had nothing to do with religion. I stopped running only when I had crossed the lower village. I hid the balance of that forenoon under Artemus Wright’s blacksmith shop, lamenting that probably I would never be allowed to play with my chum again.

It was in 1897 that the Forges bought the Brown place. Rumors of war filled the land. If war came, my father was going. My mother cried a lot about it.

III

The girlish young teacher gave Nat and me opposite aisle seats in school that autumn morning, though quickly Nathan went above me. His grandmother had taught him to read; he was already familiar with Æsop’s “Fables” and Grimm’s “Fairy Tales.”

Late that afternoon, Nat and I walked home together,—down the hill, through East Foxboro village, past the Methodist and Baptist churches, off on the Center road toward Brown’s hill. The distance was only a mile, yet it took us three hours.

Scuffing up the dust, stopping to throw stones at trees or skipping them across the surface of the Causeway—the great sheet of water reaching on both sides of the road just before we started to climb Brown’s hill—day after day during that autumn we covered that distance together.

The Causeway does not look so “great” now. Nathan and I drove over there the other day. The place was only a depressing mud flat, rank with stagnant water, grotesque stumps and tall rushes, where town loafers were trying to hook discouraged hornpout.

But to make slow progress homeward—to our “chores” perhaps, but also to fathers and mothers and faces and scenes which come now only in dreams, scaring out chipmunks, sighting an occasional sand rabbit or woodchuck, sensing the country air sensuous with ripened blackberry, goldenrod, milkweed, or the roadside pines in Hadley’s pasture—for that privilege again, dear God, Nathan and I would give of our lives many years!

For this is the first sorrow in the heart of a man, that he should have known boyhood and never been able to appreciate its heritage until the clocks of time are all run down and the chambers of his heart are peopled with ghosts!

IV

In February of the year following, the Maine was mined in Havana harbor. I remember my father coming home through a storm of raw, wet sleet and leaving his horse unharnessed while he entered the kitchen to read the headlines of the Boston paper to my mother. In great block letters on the front page was the grim word—“WAR!”

Neighbors came in after supper. Opinion had it that fighting would follow at once. They conversed as though death were in the house. While they talked, I tried to listen. I fell asleep under the sofa, and when I awoke I was in bed with mother.

I could not understand why she hugged me to her heart so fiercely and sobbed in the winter darkness.

Spring came quickly after that. It seems only yesterday that Nat and I attended the “flag-raisings” and public gatherings down on the village Common, with the boys in blue getting ready for Chickamauga. I can hear again the martial band music; I can see the flash of the drillmaster’s sword and hear the thumps of the rifle butts in the open door of the town engine house where “Captain” Jack Halloway was drilling the Foxboro boys. I watched them with throttled heart and dry, hot throat.

My father was among them!

Never shall I forget that last breakfast at home, how smart he looked in his stiff blue uniform and how heavy his rifle felt when I tried to lift it and point it at a target. I remember too that he and mother avoided each other’s eyes during that breakfast. Mother did not go to the station. She could not trust herself. I tried to see dad as the train pulled out but the crowd engulfed me.

All my life since he has been but a picture in a plush album on the center table in mother’s parlor—an erect little man with a fierce mustache, his slouch hat with crossed-muskets showing plainly.

Nathan’s father did not go to war. He said war “stood condemned by Religion.” He quit cobbling to move down to the Center and open a store.

Micah Baker’s eldest son Sela came home on a furlough the following autumn. I remember his rumpled soldiering clothes, the rakish angle of his hat, how he stood with his back to the kitchen range, warming himself. He had been ill with fever and wore an overcoat, roughly tied at the neck with a piece of rope. My mother’s face was ashen as she waited for him to speak. As he was about to leave, he remarked quietly:

“Herb wanted I should tell you his last thoughts was of you and the boy. And ... he didn’t suffer no more’n could be expected. He said especially to tell the boy his dad’s sorry he can’t be on hand to help him as he grows to manhood.”

That summer we sold the farm, mother being unable to work it with father never coming back. We also moved down to the Center. Mother happened to get a house near the Forges. So Nathan and I set our little feet upon the long journey that begins in vales of opal mystery and the wondertime of early childhood, winds pathetically through twenty years of fog while growing boys are groping to find themselves and hew their niche and accomplish their task, ... knows perhaps a few golden hours of life’s philosophic, sunlit afternoon, then ends in an afterglow of still greater mystery out behind the farthest star.

CHAPTER II
THE DRESDEN DOLL

I

Caleb Gridley, the girl’s father, ran the tannery in the larger town of Paris, twenty miles west of the Foxboros. He was a big-bodied, small headed man, with iron fists, a paving-block jaw and legs like telephone poles. Some of his words weigh seven to the pound and he did not secure them from his Bible, either, if he ever read his Bible.

Mrs. Clementina Gridley, the girl’s mother, claimed she was related on her mother’s side to a duchess. Then to double rivet the exclusive ancestry, on her father’s side she had vague claims to a relative who had crossed on a certain well-known occasion to this stern and rock-bound coast, landing at Plymouth and marking the commencement of the antique furniture business. Mrs. Gridley was short and in upper contour resembled a barrel. She clothed herself and little daughter in purple and fine linen, and both of them toiled not, neither did they spin. She brought the first lorgnette to Paris, hung its first pair of sunfast overdrapes, called old Bill Chew, the colored man-of-all-work, the “coachman”, affected to be shocked when old Caleb blew his tea in a saucer and tried unsuccessfully to start a local aristocracy.

These two—a mother with an ingrowing consciousness of her own grandeur and a father who endured it because he was too engrossed in making money to give his family much attention—were the little Gridley girl’s mental, moral and spiritual handicaps. More than one good woman’s fingers itched to paddle her; more than one good man would have counted it a special dispensation from Providence if he could have spent five minutes alone with her and thoroughly boxed her ears. But Bernie’s extremities were never paddled and Bernie’s ears were never boxed.

At four, little Bernice was told she was made of better clay than the ordinary run of Eve’s daughters and at six she was sure of it. At eight she frequently mentioned the family “blood.” At ten she had queried Mrs. Joseph Fodder if “common children were not terribly coarse and mortifying” and “why did the Creator ever make the lower classes so disgustingly prolific?”

Yet the little snob was pretty, pretty as a Dresden doll. And the Duchess kept her starched and ironed and curled and furbelowed until the tired mothers of the disgustingly prolific lower classes gave up all competition in despair.

For the opposite and lower end of the social seesaw the Forges as a family would have answered as well as any caste exhibit to the county. Living in Foxboro Center was enough. Could any social good come out of Foxboro Center? Certainly not! Mute, inglorious Miltons might infest the place, but the Gridleys—at least, the female Gridleys—aspired to nothing in common with mute, inglorious Miltons.

II

It was a pleasant July afternoon, after we had moved to the Center, that the head of the House of Gridley hitched his sleek black mare to a neat piano-box buggy and drove twenty miles eastward to call upon the House of Forge. It was not a social call. The head of the House of Gridley left all such nonsense to his Duchess. John Forge owed old Caleb three lapsed payments for harness leather and old Caleb intended “to get his money or bust hell wide open.”

When he drove forth from the Gridley gates to “bust hell wide open” that afternoon beside him was the Dresden doll. She was ironed and starched and curled and furbelowed—as usual—and she kept the sun from her peach-bloom complexion by a tiny, beribboned parasol. They had not ridden a block before old Caleb referred to this parasol. He said, “Keep that trick umbrella away from my hat or I’ll smash it!” Old Caleb was not at all aristocratic like his Duchess.

The Gridleys reached Foxboro Center. John Forge was at home, “getting in” his hay. Arrived there, old Caleb descended, backed the mare around and unhooked her check-rein. He trusted her to remain without hitching, so long as her nose was in the clover growing outside the Forge front fence. Thereupon Caleb went down into the fragrant hayfields in search of Johnathan. The mare spread her front legs and began to enjoy herself.

Little Bernice-Theresa’s first maneuver was to unwind the reins from the whip. Holding them in one hand and the foolish little parasol in the other, she greatly hoped sundry persons would appear and remark upon what a marvelous child was this, who could assume jurisdiction of an untied mare while her elders were flagrantly absent.

It may be recorded that some one did appear; Nathan Forge “materialized” beside the picket fence and the drama, old as the hills eternal, was commenced.

Nathan Forge, living in Foxboro Center, was naturally of the earth, earthy. He was likewise of the soil, soily, very much soiled in comparison with the starched and beribboned daintiness of little Bernice-Theresa. His hair needed cutting; his eyes were vague. His face had grown a few odd-thousand additional freckles with the summer vacation and one great toe was wrapped in a horribly unsanitary rag.

This product of the disgustingly prolific lower classes beheld the smart rig halted before the house and was seized with an exasperating interest.

Now every one who has been a boy, or who owns a boy, appreciates that while sisters are, generally speaking, of no earthly consequence or account whatsoever, there are girls and girls! This is better explained by studying the behavior of such a boy in propinquity with a feminine stranger who had first been properly starched and ironed and curled and furbelowed, though not conventionally introduced.

The boy does not place his feet upon the surface of the world in a methodical, orderly manner, maintaining himself in a status of physical poise and bodily rectitude. He demonstrates the difference between girls and girls by the knots in which he proceeds to tie his spine. No boy ties his spine into knots for his sister. So Nat made his first concessions to The Sex by starting to wind himself in and out through the holes where pickets were missing in his father’s fence.

I forego a record of the twistings and turnings, the writhings and contortions, which ensued to attract the attention of the Fayre Ladye and bind her to his chariot forever. He did not neglect to rub his backbone on the gatepost four times, whirl about without upsetting himself three, hit the trunk of an adjacent tree with stones twice, and balance a stick on his nose once. Then he climbed the gate and swung head downward in horrible danger of dashing out his brains.

“Lo!” he greeted. And he grinned.

The crass effrontery, the lèse-majesté, of daring to address Her Royal Highness was bad enough. But that grin!

Bernice-Theresa Gridley sat stunned. She could conjure up no phase of etiquette for meeting the situation but a posture of frigid silence and staring stiffly ahead. He was less than the dust beneath her carriage wheel. True, he wasn’t yet beneath her carriage wheel but he might land there in a moment if he didn’t stop trying to twist himself into a human interrogation point. Why didn’t her father come? Oh, the mortification of it!

“Say, what’s yer name?” persisted this awful progeny of the lower classes.

A numbing silence.

Then, though embarrassed with his daring, Nathan announced:

“That ain’t the way to drive a horse. Girls don’t know nothin’ bout animals, anyhow. I know how to drive a horse better’n that! I’ll climb up there and show yer!”

Bernice-Theresa jumped.

“You horrid boy!” she shrieked. “If you as much as touch one of these buggy wheels, I’ll have my father put you in jail where the rats will run right over your face!” It was the most hideous fate that Bernice-Theresa’s nine years could conceive.

“Huh! I ain’t afraid o’ rats! We caught a big one in our trap last night. You stay here and I’ll fetch him! You could take him home and stuff him and trim up a room with him.”

Acting on this generous impulse, Nathan quitted the gate and ran to get the rigor-mortis exhibit. And in the ensuing moments, confronted by the horror of his return, little Bernice-Theresa suffered all the tortures of the damned. A filthy, intimate boy from the disgustingly productive lower classes had gone to bring her a rat! Dead! He would handle it. He might even drop it in the buggy. She must fly while flying was possible.

But she could not climb down from the vehicle and fly with legs. That would be common and crude; beside, where in the vicinity would she fly? No, it was far more consistent for the daughter of a Duchess to fly with a horse and buggy. Therefore, ere the unspeakable vulgarian could return, Bernice-Theresa got into action.

She shut her parasol and separated the reins. She nearly pulled herself from the slippery seat, straining to raise the mare’s unwilling head from the clover. The animal’s flank was slapped sharply. When Nathan returned to the gate, the road in front of the house was empty.

Nathan headed for the lower mowing. He approached old Caleb without introduction.

“You gotta walk home, mister!” was his way of announcing the news. “Or else you better chase your buggy. Yer horse has runned off with it hitched behind him!”

Old Caleb came up through the Forge yard in four-foot jumps. He stopped for a speechless instant at the gate.

“If you’re goin’ right home, you might tell her I didn’t mean to scare her,” explained Nathan. “We caught this rat yesterday and I was going to let her have it——”

“You little blatherskite! Scared her, did you? So she took the lines and drove off home!” Caleb shook his knotty fist under John Forge’s nose. “If my girl’s hurt, I’ll sue you for this! I’ll sue you anyhow, for the leather.”

Thereupon old Caleb started after the rig in ludicrous hops.

Hours later he reached Paris. His paving-block jaw was still adamant but he had discovered no traces of buggy, daughter or wreckage en route. By a miracle Bernice-Theresa had reached home without mishap. The tragedy was this: Finding at length that she had arrived at her destination in safety, all parental solicitude vanished. Caleb Gridley took the progeny of a Duchess across his knee and spanked her!

As a result of that spanking, his wife made his life so miserable that he sued Johnathan Forge at law. He had to vent his spleen somewhere. And a week later, being served with papers by the sheriff, Johnathan Forge also had to vent his spleen somewhere and went in search of a freckled-faced little boy.

Without explanation, simply desiring something weak on which to wreak his temper, stifling his conscience with the argument that the boy’s misbehavior had frightened the Dresden doll and precipitated the whole calamity, “Brother” Forge of the local church belabored a contorting little body with a harness tug until screams and howls brought his mother.

Nat left his father and his mother “having it out.” He limped painfully, still sobbing, up the road to my house. We climbed to our haymow together and Nathan finished his weeping down beside me in the hay.

III

That was the first time Nathan and I seriously discussed The Sex,—when the boy’s grief was spent and in its wake came philosophy.

“Gee, but she was pretty, Billy,” he confided. “She was different, too, than girls here ’round Foxboro. I sort of felt funny in my insides when I seen her. Mabel Turner now—she’s fat and red-faced and her clothes is always coming apart somewheres. Mary Anderson, she’s always laughin’ and makin’ fun of my freckles, and Alice Blake’s got freckles worse’n me, and warts besides. But this girl—gee, Billy, she was swell. I wonder why was it I felt so funny about her right off as soon as I seen her. I never felt that way about no girl before. Most girls is—well, just girls!—you know!—no good!”

“That’s love!” I declared largely.

“Love?” Nathan was awed. “Then love’s swell, ain’t it?”

“Depends how you look at it. Sometimes it is. Then again it ain’t.”

Nat pondered this. It was deep. Finally in a whisper he asked:

“Billy, why is it that girls is different from boys, and women from men?”

“It’s on account of babies,” I expatiated. “Benny Mayo said so. A man told him once.”

“How, on account o’ babies, Billy?”

Thereupon I recounted boyhood’s version of the intricacies of obstetrics, as viewed by boys who are not wholly fools.

I hold no brief for myself. The parent who will not concede that mere children do not seek light on life’s greatest mystery—where do people come from?—and ultimately discuss it, is an ass. Only there was no perverted mischief on my part about it. Nathan wanted to know something. I possessed the information. It was no more than as if he had asked me how to make a willow whistle or bait a chuck-trap.

“Gee!” exclaimed Nathan frightenedly, “suppose it’s so, Billy?”

“There’s sumpin to it,” I averred. “We’re all here, ain’t we? I’m gonna ask my Ma.”

“So’m I,” declared my chum.

Nathan finally started homeward. That night he sought elucidation for the mystery exactly where it was normal he should seek it,—from his mother. But instead of supplying his need in a healthy, kindly fashion fitted to his years, Anna Forge did a narrow, vicious thing.

She whirled on her small son with an alacrity which startled the senses out of him. And she administered a shock to the sensitive boy whose effects did not entirely vanish with manhood.

“Who put such ideas into your head?” she demanded hysterically.

“Nobody ‘specially, Ma. I was just thinkin’, that’s all.”

“No! Some one put the idea into your head. Who was it?”

Nathan began to cry.

“B-B-Billy and me was talkin’ about it in the haymow this afternoon.”

“So Billy did it! I shall see Billy’s mother in the morning and have him horsewhipped for what he told you.”

Nathan began to cry harder.

“Why, Ma?” he demanded in panic.

“Because all such things are vile and dirty and filthy and horrible! Little boys who think them don’t go to heaven and have angels love them. They go to the Bad Place and are burned in fire forever and ever. You know how it hurt when you burnt your finger on my flatiron yesterday? Imagine you were burnt all over your body like that—and there was no way to stop it and you just had to suffer terribly with never a moment to sleep or forget. That’s what happens to bad little boys who say such things or even think them!”

“But why is it bad, Ma? Billy didn’t mean to be bad. We just wondered, that’s all. I can’t help thinking about ’em, can I?”

“Oh, what a wicked, wicked little boy! Your dear mother will be up in heaven and she won’t have any little son with her. Her little son will be down in the fires of hell—burning for always and always!”

The Forge woman pictured eternal torment so vividly that Nathan grew hysterical. When the woman had the boy worked into such a state that he was too terrified to stay alone in the dark because of the devils waiting to grab him, she made him promise never to think about girls or women or babies again. Sniveling, the little shaver promised.

His mother went to her bedroom and narrated the affair to her husband. Johnathan was for thrashing the boy soundly at once.

“No—you’ve given him one whipping to-day and one whipping a day is enough. I think I’ve scared him so badly that he won’t think of the subject again. And to-morrow I shall certainly see Billy’s mother. If she doesn’t chastise her dirty-minded young one, I shan’t let Nathan go on playing with him.”

Grumbling, John Forge was persuaded. Next day Mrs. Forge went into indignant session with my mother.

“Yes, Billy catechised me in the same way,” the latter responded. “I told him what I thought it sane and reasonable to tell a lad of his years. He’ll learn it outside, anyway. Probably he’ll get a sordid, vulgar, perverted version. I don’t believe you can scare these things from the minds of live-wire children, nor stifle the most normal impulses of growing boyhood. I for one shan’t try. As my boy grows I want him to feel that he can come to his mother at any time with his problems, especially his girl problems, without having the immortal daylights scared out of him or made to feel that he’s a criminal. It ain’t natural, Anna Forge, and so it ain’t common sense.”

“My boy shall not go on playing with yours, if that’s the sort of thing they’re talking.”

“Suit yourself, Anna Forge. I believe your philosophy’s wrong and you’ll live to rue it.”

“I don’t have to be told what’s decent for my own young one!”

“Maybe you do and maybe you don’t. That’s yet to be proven.”

Anna Forge stalked homeward. The two women did not speak for a month. But Nat’s mother had done a malicious thing that day. She had only turned the barb of my friend’s curiosity inward and prodded that worst enemy of the human race to attack her small son viciously: Repression.

CHAPTER III
MORE PARENTS

I

Over the meadows and far away in the dreamy hush of summer days; lying amid scented haycocks and watching the castling clouds drift away like floating fairy isles in a sea of turquoise; listening to the church bells of a quiet Sunday morning; hearing the clear, distant note of a trombone across the valley from some farmhouse in the afterglow; watching the log sleds toil up the hill past our homes into the cold, carmine glory of winter sunsets. Boyhood’s Memory Book is an anthology of little things—sweet, sad, haunting, all vital, ever poignant with heart-hunger—calling us back to live in their atmosphere again, if only for a single blessed day.

Somehow Nat and I fail to remember the ending of the Spanish war as we recall the beginning. Occasionally we would be loitering about the station when trains pulled in and sun-bronzed men in rumpled blue would swing off in pairs, with blanket rolls around their bodies, thump their rifles down in the corner of the nearest lunchroom and appear too ravenously hungry even to flirt with the girl who presided behind the sandwiches and wedges of leathery pie beneath glass globes.

The war did not stop. It petered out. I will not say I did not cry many times in the night when my mother cried, because both of us missed father. But the war was not for Nathan and me,—not for our generation to bear. Our war was coming later. We found food of some kind available when we hungered and boys are not epicures. So long as that food was forthcoming, and we had a place to sleep at night, wars or endings of wars affected us not We were too occupied with things that were close to us and close to the soil.

One afternoon in the spring of 1917, before we went to war, Nathan and I were walking together when we came upon a crowd of deadly serious youngsters playing in a vacant lot. One boy, tied securely, was arousing the neighborhood with his shrieking.

“We’re playin’ he’s a German interned for perdition,” one of the lads explained.

“Perdition?” exclaimed Nathan.

“Yeah! Oratin’ against the government and tryin’ to stop the war fer them that wanner fight. Intern fer perdition, doncher understand? Interned for perdition!”

“Kids don’t change much, Bill,” commented Nat, with a sad smile, as we resumed our way. “Remember the day we played ‘Hang the Spy’ and almost succeeded?”

“I remember it, Nat,” I said. “But not because it has anything to do with the sameness of boyhood in different generations. I remember it for what happened to you afterward—what you got for it.”

Nathan sighed. We paced a long way in silence. It was not hard to recall the rear-tragic events of that afternoon and their aftermath.

II

We caught Nathan duly as the Castilian spy, and made him “surrender his papers.” A court-martial passed fatal judgment upon him. He was led out beneath one of the trees in Mrs. Fairbank’s orchard and ordered to mount “the scaffold”, a dilapidated barrel. Around a high limb I succeeded in tying one end of a rope. It had a slip noose at its dangling end about eight feet from the ground. After much perspiration I got this noose over Nathan’s head.

“There’s too much slack in it,” the condemned man suggested, anxious that there should be no bungle in the ceremony to spoil the grandeur. “When I’m hung, my feet’ll touch the ground and then I won’t be! You better slip it further down, Billy—under my arms or round my waist.”

Rather than reclimb the tree and retie the rope, I conceded.

A little French boy named Beauchamp was commissioned to kick away the barrel and “send the miserable felon to the wrath of a jealous God.” We had somewhere heard it phrased so.

Rolland Beauchamp played his part perfectly. In fact, the whole execution was a bit too perfect. On a frenzied run our mothers started for that orchard when from under the biggest, highest tree began the wildest and most horrible howling that ever disturbed the quiet of pastoral Vermont.

The spy, on being hung, had thought better of his fate. It wasn’t a bit of fun to be hung. Yet one could not altogether blame him. Never was a spy hung as our spy was hung.

I had slipped the noose too far down Nathan’s body. When the barrel went out, the upper half of his torso outweighed his legs. He was whipped upside down in a twinkling and hung there ignominiously, kicking wildly ’twixt terra firma and the stars.

This in itself wouldn’t have been so distressing if he had not been suspended in a slipnoose. The more he kicked and bellowed the sharper it tightened.

“We tried to hang him!” cried the terrified little French boy.

“Tried!” wailed a wrathful mother when she beheld her offspring suspended upside down, just out of reach.

“We could get him down with a ladder, if we only had one!” volunteered the small Mayo boy who had been responsible for all this brilliant business. “Mr. Simpson’s got one, a mile down the river. I tell you what!” he suggested enthusiastically to Mrs. Forge, “you come and ask my mother if I can hitch up our horse and I’ll go after it! I could make it in less’n an hour an’ not half try!”

“And leave this boy to be squeezed to death? I never saw a Mayo around Foxboro yet that wasn’t a fool!” Mrs. Forge wrung her hands. “Oh, oh, oh! Somebody’s got to climb that tree and cut this boy down and do it quickly, or he’ll die o’ pinched vitals! Oh! oh! oh!”

“But if he’s cut down sudden, he’ll land on his head and break his neck,” groaned Mrs. Harper. “Why on earth should they hang him upside down?”

Nat’s unpremeditated inversion had complicated matters. And all this time the spy was kicking and struggling and bellowing until it was a mystery why he wasn’t heard down in the business part of the town. Moreover, the prospects were that if he were left there much longer, any attempts to cut him down would be superfluous; he was coming down himself—in halves!

But the Providence that looks after children, drunken men and fools was proverbially kind that afternoon. It sent old Amos Winch riding past atop a load of oats. Amos took note of a kicking, shrieking boy suspended from an apple bough above a group of distraught women and children and came down through that orchard in jumps. As he ran, he unclasped a big pocketknife. Out on the limb, he wound a taut rope twice about his mighty hand. Then he hacked and cut above it. Hand over hand he hauled the little Forge boy up, caught him firmly by the collar and straightened him out.

Immediately that he was down and manifestly unhurt, Mrs. Forge walked over to a lower apple bough and pulled off a “sucker.” She stripped the switch clean of leaves and grasped her youngster firmly by the collar.

“But Ma!—I didn’t mean to do it! Please, Ma, don’t whip me. I didn’t mean to do it!”

“I suppose you got hung upside down like that accidentally.”

“We was only just playing ‘Hang the Spy’!”

“And scaring your good, dear mother in consequence so she’s nearly a nervous wreck. I’m going to see you remember never to do such a thing again.”

“Anna!” interposed my mother, “don’t be a fool!”

“You keep out of this!” snapped Mrs. Forge. “I can run my own young ones without assistance from the neighbors.”

And there, before that distressed audience, Nathan “got it good.”

III

I have not narrated this episode especially to excoriate Anna Forge. I mention it because—horror of horrors!—among the teams to be blocked in the road by Amos Winch’s cart was the neat piano-box buggy and mare of Caleb Gridley. The Duchess was out for a drive with the Dresden Doll.

Nathan knew that the princess of his dreams was beholding him “catching it.” And the welts of that switch did not manufacture half as much pain as the hurts which resulted to his dignity. For a boy has dignity. It is usually a hard, honest, legitimate dignity in sharp contrast to mere self-elation too often masquerading under that name among older people. And that boyish dignity is a heritage. In after years it is the genesis of that invaluable attribute, Self-respect.

IV

The hanging episode was scarcely history before Nat and I got into another scrape, illustrating the brilliant Forge method of shaping childhood.

The execution of martial enemies being a bit too strenuous, the fertile little Mayo boy hit on “Slave in the Dismal Swamp.” He assured all witnesses that it was capital sport playing “Slave in the Dismal Swamp.”

In all our town, however, there was no colored boy, let alone a small colored boy, available as the slave to escape and be hunted. But that did not hamper the Mayo boy’s ingenuity.

“One of us can black himself and be the slave,” he suggested.

“What with?” I demanded. “Ma won’t let us have any matches to burn cork. Besides, we couldn’t get cork enough anyhow.”

“I know what’s good and black that we can get a lot of,” Benny Mayo promised. “You all come with me and I’ll show you.”

He led us down behind the Mayo barn. Several old carts, hayracks and farm implements were stored there.

“Now then, Nathan, you take off all your clothes and we’ll black you,” Benny directed. “This ain’t goin’ to hurt you. How can it?”

“I won’t do it unless Billy will!” Nathan objected stoutly.

I submitted.

We disrobed, au naturel. The little Mayo boy and the others set to work on us.

From the inside of the wagon hubs was scooped the blackest, deadliest grease the malignity of man has ever invented. The axles of the vehicles, especially one old dump cart, were rich with it.

Over the sunburned pelts of our little bodies the stuff was smeared in handfuls. It smelled frightfully but we remembered how it must feel to be a real slave, and stood it as stoically as possible.

From head to foot we were covered with the green-black “goo.” Our handlers took especial care to rub it well into our hair and ears. When that smearing “was called a job”, we were Africans with a vengeance. And the odor shrieked to heaven.

“But we can’t put on our clothes with this stuff all over us!” wailed Nat suddenly.

“Slaves in a dismal swamp don’t need no clothes,” the Mayo boy contended. “Start off just like you are and it’ll make it harder to hunt you.”

“But somebody might see us without any clothes and arrest us!”

“That’s why it’s goin’ to make it harder to hunt you; you’ll keep out of sight better without clothes.”

The dismal swamp was a cat-tail bog over on the Hastings farm. Thither by back lanes we were escorted, the “ferocious bloodhounds” being the Mayo boy’s sky terrier, Pink, and Nat’s shepherd dog, Ned, with the aforesaid immunity from the depredations of skunks.

Nat and I were turned loose like two justly celebrated gold-dust twins, minus all concessions to civilization. And in the next two hours we became relieved that there had been an Emancipation Proclamation.

As the afternoon waned, the mosquitoes were bad enough. But Nat’s little sister, Edith, had beheld our “making-up” from afar, and about the time we entered the Dismal Swamp, she reached our mothers and told her story. Two highly exasperated, grim-lipped women ultimately joined the “bloodhounds” and outdid them. For our mothers found us and the dogs did not.

Splashed with mud and slime on top of our coating of axle grease, scratched by brambles and bruised by limbs of dead trees which protruded from the most unexpected places, the slaves in the dismal swamp finally found a soft spot to sit down and weep with a great lamentation. We had a disturbing hunch from our experience in the bog water that our Ethiopian camouflage was not going to be removed with any such dexterity as the Mayo boy had assured us so glibly.

The posse finally surrounded us. There was no escaping through that cordon. Our mothers’ skirts were bedraggled.

Their shoes squeegeed water at every step. But they bagged us. And the expression on their faces when they held us at arm’s length was sickening. Somehow we felt that again the Mayo boy had “spoofed” us. The Mayo boy was not among those present when we were taken into custody, by the way.

“We’re slaves in a Dismal Swamp,” explained Nathan, when his mother had firmly entwined her fingers around a slippery ear.

“Well, in mighty short order you’re going to be two sorrowful boys in a darned dismal wash-dish!” prophesied that wrathful lady. And she looked at my mother, not knowing whether to laugh or to cry.

“Anna,” gasped my horrified mother, “—suppose—suppose—it won’t wash off!”

“Then I’ll set fire to my young one and burn it off!” avowed Mrs. Forge grimly. Whereupon Nathan began caterwauling and his asseverations that he didn’t mean to do it became as sounding brass and tinkling cymbals.

Through the ups and downs of thirty years I have made many strange journeys over many rough pathways. Not one of them has equaled the awfulness of traversing those two miles of oozy bog that summer afternoon, dragged wrathfully by a grim woman whose concentration was glued on the impending ordeal of separating me from that unspeakable coating of slime and grease.

“When I catch that Mayo young one,” announced my mother, “I’ll skin him alive!”

“Amen!” affirmed Anna Forge. She gave Nathan a yank that pulled him over a boghole as though he were greased. Which he was. Greased thoroughly, adequately, irrevocably.

We got as far as the Forge homestead, and my mother decided to stop there and cleanse her offspring in company with her neighbor, rather to lighten the labor—to say nothing of the color of her boy—by sharing it.

They tried rain water and they tried soap. They tried cold water and they tried hot. None of it made any more impression than as if they’d been trying to wash a duck. They tried scraping it off with a paddle, as one scrapes butter from a slice of bread. In certain localities this last went so far as to disclose that deep down under the mass we were young humans of the Aryan persuasion. In our babyhood we might even have been pink. But at present we were anything but pink. We were a sort of blue-mauve-green.

“My God!” cried the nearly hysterical Mrs. Forge. “There’s going to be no getting this off successfully short of boiling ’em!” Thereat, the woman’s neurasthenia got the better of her and she wept.

“Anna, stop your blubbering! I’m going to try kerosene,” my mother announced. “Billy may go round the rest of his life smelling like the dirty end of a grocery store, but I’ll have the satisfaction of knowing I ‘seen my duty and I done it.’” And she whacked a little French boy for meddling with her washcloths.

The two women pooled all the kerosene they could find in the neighborhood. It wasn’t the fairly cleanly product that may be purchased in 1921. It is debatable which was rankest in taste, feeling or smell—that yellowish coal oil or the devilish massage-muck which now ran down our shivering bodies in streaks. Filling a tub with it, mother started in, determined, like Grant, to fight it out along that line if it took all summer. The prospects were that it would take all summer.

I forget in how many “waters” of oil, hot steam and soapsuds they washed us. Somewhere around thirty-seven. There is no reason to doubt the figure. So much concentrated washing had never happened to either of us before. Thank God, it has never been needed since.

Nat and I were two sick boys—physically as well as spiritually—long before those ablutions were completed. A sizable number of persons of color, sold into servitude, have undoubtedly been lost in swamps. But Nathan Forge and his biographer were the first in history who were captured, dragged out and washed in thirty-seven “waters” before being slated for additional chastisement.

Vividly I recollect little Nathan’s plaintive plea at about the thirty-fifth “water”, when he gradually began to exhibit evidences of Caucasian extraction.

“Ma, are you goin’ to lick me?” he demanded, gazing timorously up into his mother’s twitching countenance. It was the fearful, pitiful interrogatory of a naked, shivering, thoroughly chastened little boy who had taken the word of a fellow man at its face value and discovered, like the psalmist of old, that all men are liars.

“I’m too done up to lick you! I’m going to let your father lick you!” his mother assured him.

“Anna Forge, are you crazy?” my mother exploded.

“No, but I’m going to see that some discretion is put in his make-up if I have to brand it in with an iron!”

“You may brand in more than discretion, Anna.”

“I’ll take my chances!”

V

I was sobbing—mainly for Nathan’s sake—when my mother led me home. She wrapped my red, flaccid little body in warm flannels and put me to bed. I heard no censure for my part in the day’s foolishness. Only she said wearily before she took out the light:

“Please, laddie, never play ‘Slave in the Dismal Swamp’ again. You see what mother had to do, how tired she is?”

“Yes, Ma!”

“Then always remember, when a fellow does something wrong—sooner or later—somehow or other—it’s his mother that pays the price.”

I could not see her haggard face for my tears.

She laughed,—a queer, tired, tender laugh. Then she kissed me again and was gone. My grief was mercifully merged in slumber.

VI

It was a week before Nathan left his bed. His father threw an ax handle at me when I went around to the rear of the Forge premises to see if Nathan could come out to play.

I think Johnathan was a bit ashamed of himself and likewise afraid. He took this gentle method of suggesting that the neighbors, particularly the neighbors’ offspring, keep out of his family affairs. Because Nathan had dropped unconscious during his subsequent chastisement and remained unconscious all night. Next day a doctor was summoned. The doctor was told that Nathan must have eaten something which had failed to agree with him.

I finally figured out, in a boyish way, what was amiss in Nathan’s relation to his parents, particularly his father.

Obedience, to Johnathan, consisted in a child instinctively knowing beforehand the thing to which the parental mind objected and avoiding consummation of that thing like a pestilence. Then, too, floggings and thrashings were uniformly good for a youngster. They gave him character and made him love and respect his dear parents when he had grown to manhood and looked back on what an exasperating little devil he had been and how much he had “tried” those who had done the most for him.

CHAPTER IV
THE FAIRY FOUNDLING

I