Read Ebook: The fog by Pelley William Dudley

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Ebook has 2685 lines and 116237 words, and 54 pages

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.

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."

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."

"Why ain't you hired 'em already?"

"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.

"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."

Johnathan nearly fell on his forehead.

"Twenty dollars, yeah!"

"I'm filling a superintendent's job here that couldn't be filled by any one else short of thirty. I'll pay board at home. 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 he had 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."

"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."

"Compromises him?"

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