: The fog by Pelley William Dudley - New England Fiction; Bildungsromans; Man-woman relationships Fiction; Families Fiction

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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 come for 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.

II

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--it saved 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."

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