Henry Is Twenty: A Further Episodic History of Henry Calverly, 3rd

‘Don’t Hump!’

Humphrey resisted the impulse to reply with a ‘Don’t what?’

‘Go on! Don’t disturb me!’

‘You seem to be hitting it up.’

‘I am. I can’t talk! Please – go away! Go to bed. You’ll make me lose it!’

Humphrey obeyed.

Later – well along in the night – he awoke.

There was a crack of light about his door. He turned on his own light. It was quarter to three.

‘Here!’ he called. ‘What on earth are you up to, Hen?’ A chair scraped. Then Henry came to the door and burst it open. His coat was off now, and his vest open. He had unbuttoned his collar in front so that the two ends and the ends of his tie hung down. His hair was straggling down over his forehead.

‘Do you know what time it is, Hen?’

‘No. Say – listen to this! Just a few sentences. You liked the piece I did about the Business Men’s Picnic, remember. Well, this has sorta grown out of it. It’s just the plain folks along Simpson Street. Say! There’s a title for the book.’

‘For the what!’

‘The book. Oh, there’ll be a lot of them. Sorta sketches. Or maybe they’re stories. I can’t tell yet. Plain folks of Simpson Street. Yes, that’s good. Wait a second, while I write it down. The thing struck me all at once – to-night! – Queer, isn’t it! – thinking about the folks along the street – Bill Hemple, and Jim Smith in your press room with the tattooed arms, and old Boice and Charlie Waterhouse, and the way Bob McGibbon blew into town with a big dream, and the barber shop – Schultz and Schwartz’s – and Donovan’s soda fountain, and Izzy Bloom and the trouble about his boys in the high school, and all his fires, and Mr Draine, the Y.M.C.A. secretary that’s been in the British Mounted Police in Mashonaland – think of it! In Africa – and – ’

‘Would you mind’ – Humphrey was on an elbow, blinking sleepy eyes – ‘would you mind talking a little more slowly. Good lord! I can’t – ’

‘All right, Hump. Only I’m excited, sorta. You see, it just struck me that there’s as much romance right here on Simpson Street as there is in Kipling’s Hills or Bagdad or Paris. Just the way people’s lives go. And what old Berger’s really thinking about when he tells you the vegetables were picked yesterday.’

Humphrey gazed – wider awake now – at the wild figure before him. And a thrill stirred his heart. This boy was supposed to be crushed.

‘How much have you done?’ he asked soberly.

‘Most finished this first one. It’s about old Boice and Charlie Waterhouse and Mr Weston – ’

‘Gee!’ said Humphrey.

‘I call it, The Caliph of Simpson Street.’

‘Well – see here, you’re going to bed, aren’t you?’

‘Oh, yes. But listen.’ And he began reading aloud.

Humphrey waved his arms.

‘No, no! For heaven’s sake, go to bed, Hen!’

‘Well, but – oh, say! Just thought of something!’ And he went out, chuckling.

Humphrey awoke again at eight. Through his open door came a light that was not altogether of the sun.

The incident of the earlier morning came to him in confused form, like a dream.

He sprang out of bed.

There, still bending over the atlas, was Henry. The sheets of paper lay like drifts of snow about him now. His pencil was flying.

He looked up. His face was white and red in spots now. He was grinning, apparently out of sheer happiness.

‘Say,’ he cried, ‘listen to this! It’s one I call, The Cauliflowers of the Caliph. Oh, by the way, I’ve changed the title of the book to Satraps of the Simple.

‘The whole book’ll be sort of imaginary, like that. It’s queer. Just as if it came to be out of the air. Things I never thought of in my life. Only everything I ever knew’s going into it. Things I’d forgotten.’

‘Hen,’ said Humphrey, ‘are you stark mad?’

‘Me? Why – why no, Hump!’ The grin was a thought sheepish now. ‘But – well, Bob McGibbon said we needed stuff for the paper.’

‘How many stories have you written already?’

‘Just three.’

‘Three! In one night!’

‘But they’re short, Hump. I don’t believe-they average over two or three thousand words. I think they’re good. You know, just the way they made me feel. Funny idea – Bagdad and Simpson Street, all mixed up together.’

‘One thing’s certain, Hen. You’re an extremely surprising youth, but right here’s where you quit. I don’t propose to have a roaring maniac here in the rooms. On my hands.’

‘Oh, Hump, I can’t quit now! You don’t understand. It’s wonderful. It just comes. Like taking dictation.’

‘Dictation is what you’re going to take. Right now. From me. Brush up your clothes, and pick up all that mess while I dress. We’ll go out for some breakfast.’

‘Not now, Hump! Wait – I promise I’ll go out a little later.’

‘You’ll go now. Get up.’

Henry obeyed. But he nearly fell back again.

‘Gosh!’ he murmured.

‘Stiff, eh?’

‘I should smile. And sorta weak.’

‘No wonder. Come on, now! And I want your promise that after breakfast you’ll go straight to bed.’

‘Hump, I can’t.’

This, apparently, was the truth. He couldn’t.

He stopped in at Jackson’s Book Store (formerly B. F. Jones’s) and bought paper and pencils: Then, in a thrill of fresh importance, he bought penholders, large desk blotters, a flannel pen-wiper with a bronze dog seated in the centre, a cut-glass inkstand, a ruler, half a dozen pads of a better paper, a partly abridged dictionary, Roget’s Thesaurus, (for years he had casually wondered what a Thesaurus was), a round glass paperweight with a gay butterfly imprisoned within, four boxes of wire clips, assorted sizes, and, because he saw it, Crabb’s Synonyms. Then he saw an old copy of The Thousand and One Nights and bought that.

It seemed to him that he ought to be equipped for his work. Before he went out he asked the prices of the better makes of typewriters.

And for the first time in two years, he uttered the magic but too often fatal words: —

‘Just charge it, if you don’t mind.’

7

He was back at the rooms by nine-fifteen. Before the university clock boomed out the hour of noon, he had written that elusive, extraordinary little classic, A Kerbstone Barmecide, and had jotted down suggestive notes for the story that was later to be known as The Printer and the Pearls.

By this time all thoughts of civic reform had faded out. Charlie Waterhouse, now that The Caliph of Simpson Street was done and, in a surface sense, forgotten, no longer appeared to him as a crook who should be ousted from the local political triumvirate and from town office; he was but a bit of ore in the rich lode of human material with which Henry’s fancy was playing. The important fact about the new Waterhouse store-and-office building in South Sunbury, was not that there was reason to believe Charlie had built it with town money but that he had put a medallion bas-relief of himself in terra cotta in the front wall.

Charlie figured, though, unquestionably, in Sinbad the Treasurer.

At noon, deciding that he would stroll out after a little and eat a bite, Henry stretched out on the lounge. Here he dozed, very lightly for an hour or two.

Humphrey stole in, found him tossing there, fully dressed, mumbling in his sleep, and stole out.

But early in the afternoon Henry leaped up. His brain, or his emotions, or whatever the source of his ideas, was a glowing, boiling, seething crater of tantalising, obscurely associated concepts and scraps of characterisation and queerly vivid, half-glimpsed dramatic moments, situations, contrasts. They amounted to a force that dragged him on. The thought that some bit might escape before he could catch it and get it written down kept his pulse racing.

At about half-past four he finished that curious fantasy, Roc’s Eggs, Strictly Fresh.

This accomplishment brought a respite. He could see his book clearly now. The cover, the title page and particularly the final sentence. He knew that the concluding story was to be called The Old Man of the Street. He printed out this title; printed, too, several titles of others yet to be written —Ali Anderson and the Four Policemen and Scheherazade in a Livery Stable, and one or two more.

His next performance I find particularly interesting in retrospect. During the long two years of his extreme self-suppression in the vital matters of candy, girls, and charge-accounts, Henry had firmly refused to sing. Without a murmur he had foregone the four or five dollars a Sunday he could easily have picked up in church quartet work, the occasional sums from substituting in this or that male quartet and singing at funerals. It was even more extraordinary that he should have given up, as he did, his old habit of singing to girls. The only explanation he had ever offered of this curious stand was the rather obscure one he gave Humphrey that singing was ‘too physical.’ Whatever the real complex of motives, it had been a rather violent, or at least a complete reaction.

But now he strode about the room, chin up, chest expanded, brows puckered, roaring out scales and other vocalisings in his best voice. The results naturally were somewhat disappointing, after the long silence, but he kept at it.

He was still roaring, half an hour later, when McGibbon came anxiously in.

‘Saw Humphrey Weaver down-town,’ said the editor of the Gleaner, ‘and he said I’d better look you up.’

An hour later McGibbon – red spots in his cheeks, a nervous glitter in his eyes – hurried down to the Gleaner office with the pencilled manuscripts of four of the ‘Caliph’ stories. He was hurrying because it seemed to him highly important to get them into type. For one thing, something might happen to them – fire, anything. For another, it might occur to Henry to sell them to an eastern magazine.

When Humphrey came in, just before six, Henry was already well into Scheherazade in a Livery Stable, and was chuckling out loud as he wrote.

Friday night was press night at the Gleaner office. Henry strolled in about ten o’clock and carelessly dropped a thick roll of script on McGibbon’s desk.

That jaded editor leaned back, ran thin fingers through his tousled hair, and wearily looked over the dishevelled, yawning, exhausted, grinning youth before him. Never in his life had he seen an expression of such utter happiness on a human face.

‘How many stories is this?’ he asked.

‘Ten.’

‘Good Lord! That’s a whole book!’

‘No – hardly. I’ve thought of some more. There’ll be fifteen or twenty altogether. I just thought of one, coming over here. Think I’ll call it. The Story of the Man from Jerusalem. It’s about the life of a little Jew storekeeper in a town like this. Struck me all of a sudden – you know, how he must feel. I don’t think I’ll write it to-night – just make a few notes so it won’t get away from me.’

Bob McGibbon rose up, put on coat and hat, took, Henry firmly by the arm, and marched him, protesting, home.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘you go to bed.’

‘Sure, Bob! What’s the matter with you! I’m just going to jot down a few notes – ’

‘You’re going to bed!’ said McGibbon.

And he stood there, earnest, even grim, until Henry was undressed and stretched out peacefully asleep.’

Henry slept until nearly three o’clock Saturday afternoon.

8

Senator Watt laid down the Gleaner, took off his glasses, removed an unlighted cigar from his mouth, and said, in his low, slightly husky voice: —

‘A really remarkable piece of work. Quite worthy of Kipling.’ The nineties, as we have already remarked, belong to Kipling. Outright. He had to be mentioned. ‘It is fresh, vivid, and remarkably condensed. The author produces his effects with a sure swift stroke of the brush.’

The Senator rarely spoke. When he did it was always in these measured, solid sentences, as if his words might be heard round the world and therefore must be chosen with infinite care. After delivering himself of this opinion he resumed his ‘dry smoke’ and reached for the Evening Post, which lay folded back to the financial page.

‘I was sure you would think so,’ said Cicely Hamlin, glancing first at the Senator then at her aunt. ‘I wish you would read it, Aunt Eleanor.’

‘Hm!’ remarked that formidable person, planting her own gold-rimmed glasses firmly astride her rugged nose just above the point where it bent sharply downward, picking up the paper, then lowering it to gaze with a hint of habitual, impersonal severity at her niece.

‘Even so,’ she said. ‘Suppose the young man has gifts. That will hardly make it necessary for you to cultivate him. I gather he’s a bad lot.’

‘I have no intention of cultivating him,’ replied Cicely, moving toward the door, but pausing by the mantel to pat her dark ample hair into place. She wore it low on her shapely neck. Cicely was wearing a simple-appearing, far from inexpensive blue frock.

Madame Watt read the opening sentence of The Caliph of Simpson Street, then lowered the paper again.

‘Are you going out, Cicely?’

‘No, I expect company here.’

‘Who is coming?’

The girl compressed her lips for an instant, then: —

‘Elberforce Jenkins.’

‘Hm!’ said Madame, and raised the paper.

An electric bell rang.

Cicely came back into the room; stood by a large bowl of roses; considered them.

The butler passed through the wide hall. A voice sounded in the distance. The butler appeared.

‘Mr Henry Calverly calling,’ he said.

Madame Watt raised her head so abruptly that her glasses fell, brought up with a jerk at the end of a thin gold chain, and swung there.

Cicely stood motionless by the roses.

The Senator glanced up, then shifted his cigar and resumed his study of the financial page.

‘You will hardly – ’ began Madame.

‘Show him into the drawing-room,’ said Cicely with dignity.

The butler wavered.

Then, as if to settle all such small difficulties, Henry himself appeared behind him, smiling naively, eagerly.

Cicely hurried forward. Her quick smile came, and the little bob of her head.

‘How do you do?’ she said brightly. ‘Mr Calverly – my aunt, Madame Watt! And my uncle, Senator Watt!’

Madame Watt arose, deliberately, not without a solid sort of majesty. She was a presence; no other such ever appeared in Sunbury. She fixed an uncompromising gaze on Henry.

So uncompromising was it that Cicely covered her embarrassment by moving hurriedly toward the drawingroom, with a quick: —

‘Come right in here.’

There was no one living on this erratic earth who could have cowed Henry on this Saturday evening. A week later, yes. But not to-night. He never even suspected that Madame meant to cow him. In such moments as these (and there were a good many of them in his life) Henry was incapable of perceiving hostility toward himself. The disaster that on Tuesday had seemed the end of the world was to-night a hazy memory of another epoch. There were few grown or half-grown persons in Sunbury that were not thinking on this evening of the meanest scandal in the known history of the town and, incidentally, among others involved, of Henry Calverly; but Henry himself was of those few.

He marched straight on Madame with cordial smile and outstretched hand. He wrung the hand of the impassive Senator.

That worthy said, now: —

‘I have just read this first of your new series of sketches. Allow me to tell you that I think it admirable. In the briefest possible compass you have pictured a whole community in its petty relationships, at once tragic and comic. There is caustic satire in this sketch, yet I find deep human sympathy as well. It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance.’

When, after a rather amazing outpouring of words – the thing didn’t amount to much; just a rough draft really; he hoped they’d like the next one; it was about cauliflowers – he had disappeared into the front room, the Senator remarked: —

‘The young man makes an excellent impression.’

‘The young man,’ remarked Madame, ‘is all right.’

Half an hour later the noise of the front door opening, and a voice, caused the two young people to start up out of a breathless absorption in the story called A Kerbstone Barmecide, which Henry was reading from long strips of galley proof. He had already finished The Cauliflowers of the Caliph.

For a moment Cicely’s face went blank.

The butler announced: —

‘Mr Jenkins calling, Miss Cicely.’

The one who was not equal to the situation was Elbow. He stood in the doorway, staring.

Cicely was only a moment late with her smile.

Henry, with an open sigh of regret, nodded at his old acquaintance and folded up the long strips of galley proof.

Elbow came into the room now, and took Cicely’s hand. But his small talk had gone with his wits. He barely returned Henry’s nod. Cicely, nervously active, suggested a chair, asked if there was going to be a Country Club dance this week, thanked him for the beautiful roses.

Then silence fell upon them; an awkward silence, that seemed to announce when it set in its intention of making itself increasingly awkward and very, very long. It was confirmed as a hopeless silence by the sudden little catchings of breath, the slight leaning forward, followed by nothing at all – first on the part of Cicely, then of Elbow.

Henry sat still.

Once he raised his eyes. They met squarely the eyes of Elbow. For a long moment each held the gaze. It was war.

Cicely said now, greatly confused: —

‘I know that you sing, Mr Calverly. Please do sing something.’

There, now, was an idea! It appealed warmly to Henry. He went straight to the piano, twisted up the stool, struck his three chords in turn, and plunged into that old song of Samuel’s Lover’s that has quaint charm when delivered with spirit and humour, Kitty of Coleraine.

After which he sang, Rory O’More. He had spirit and humour aplenty to-night.

The Senator came quietly in, bowed to Elbow, and asked for The Low-Back Car.

Elbow left.

‘Why did you tell me you hadn’t any stories you could bring?’ Cicely asked, a touch of indignation in her voice.

‘It was so. I didn’t.’

‘You had these.’

‘No. I didn’t. That’s just it!’

‘But you don’t mean – ’

‘Yes! Just since I met you!’

‘Ten stories, you said. It seems – I can’t – ’

‘But it’s true. Three days. And nights, of course. I’ve been so excited!’

‘I never heard of such a thing! Though, of course, Stevenson wrote Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in three days. But ten different stories.’… She sat quiet, her hands folded in her lap, very thoughtful, flatteringly thoughtful. ‘It sounds a little like magic.’

She was delicately pretty, sitting so still in her big chair.

‘I wrote them straight at you,’ he said, low, earnest. ‘Every word.’

Even Henry caught the extreme emphasis of this, and hurried to elaborate.

‘You see I was just sick Tuesday night. Everything had gone wrong with me. And then that horrible story that wasn’t true. I knew I shouldn’t have spoken of it to you, but – well, it was just driving me crazy, and I couldn’t bear to think you might despise me like the others without ever knowing the truth. And… You see I must have felt the inspiration you… Even then, I mean…’

He was red. He seemed to be getting himself out of breath. And he was tugging at the roll of proofs in his pocket.

‘Shall I – finish – this?’

‘Oh, yes!’ She sank into a great leather chair; looked up at him with glowing eyes. ‘I want you to read me all of them. Please!’

She said it almost shyly.

Henry drew up a chair, found his place, and read on. And on. And on.

It was victory.

VII – THE BUBBLE, REPUTATION

1

There is nothing more unsettling than a sudden uncalculated, incalculable success. It at once thrills, depresses, confuses. People attack with the most unexpected venom. Others, the most unexpected others, defend with vehemence, One feels queerly out of it, yet forlornly conspicuous. As if it were some one else, or a dream. Innocent effort dragged to the public arena, quarrelled over, misunderstood. One boasts and apologises in a breath; dreads the thing will keep up and fears it will stop; finds one day it has stopped and ever after thinks back in sentimental retrospect to the good old days, the great days, when one did stir them up a bit.

Henry awoke on this Saturday morning to a sense of trouble that hung heavily over him during the walk with Humphrey from the rooms to Stanley’s. Nothing of the stir reached them here. They were so late that the restaurant was about empty. Humphrey did hear a faint, distant voice booming, but gave no particular thought to it at the moment. And the Stanleys went quietly about their business as usual. Henry, indeed, was deep in his personal concern.

This found words over the oatmeal. He drew a rumpled paper from his pocket and submitted it to his room mate.

‘Got this last night,’ Henry explained moodily.

Humphrey read the following pencilled communication: —

‘Henry Calverly, can’t you see that your attentions are making it hard for a certain young lady? Do you want to injure her reputation along with yours? Why don’t you do the decent thing and leave town!

‘A Round Robin of People Who Know You.’

Humphrey pursed his lips over it.

‘It’s the Mamie Wilcox trouble, of course,’ he said finally.

Henry nodded. His mouth drooped at the corners. There was a shine in his eyes.

Humphrey folded the paper; handed it back.

‘Do you know who did it?’

Henry shook his head. ‘They printed it out. Oh, I can make guesses, of course. It’s about Cicely Hamlin and me.’

‘You can’t do anything.’

‘I know.’

‘And maybe you’re going to be so successful that it won’t matter. Laugh at ‘em.’

‘I don’t believe that, Hump. I can’t even imagine it.’

‘At that, it may be jealousy.’

‘I’ve thought of that. Even if it is…’ they’re partly right. I didn’t do what they think, but… Don’t you see, Hump?’

‘Oh, yes, I see clearly enough.’

‘I’ve felt it. When I was all stirred up over my work, I went there to call. Last Saturday night. Then I got to thinking.’ His voice was unsteady, but he kept on. Rather doggedly. ‘I’ve stayed away all this week. Just worked. You know. You’ve seen how I’ve kept at it. Until Thursday night. I sorta slipped up then and went around there. She was out. And that’s all. I’ve thought I – I’ve felt… Hump, do you believe in love – you know – at first sight?’

Humphrey’s long face wrinkled into a rather wry smile, then sobered.

‘I ought to,’ he replied. ‘In a way it was like that – with me.’

2

The first of Henry’s meaty, fantastic little stories of the plain folk of the village, that one called The Caliph of Simpson Street, had appeared in the Gleaner of the preceding Saturday. It had made a distinct stir.

The second story was out on this the Saturday of our present narrative. In the order of writing, and in Henry’s plans, it should have been The Cauliflowers of the Caliph. But Bob McGibbon, hanging wearily over the form in the press room late Friday night, suddenly hit on the notion of putting Sinbad the Treasurer in its place. He had all but the last one or two in type by that time. There were no mechanical difficulties; and he didn’t consult the author. He could hit Charlie Waterhouse harder this way. The Cauliflowers was quietly humorous; while Sinbad the Treasurer had a punch. That was how McGibbon put it to the foreman, Jimmy Albers. The word ‘punch’ was fresh slang then. McGibbon himself introduced it into Sunbury.

Henry had Charlie and the town money in the back of his head, of course, when he wrote Sinbad. Probably more than he himself knew. McGibbon sniffed a sensation in the brief, vivid narrative. And a sensation of some sort he had to have. It was now or never with McGibbon… He was able even to chuckle at the way Charlie would froth. He couldn’t admit that the coat fitted, of course. He would just have to froth. It was Henry’s naïveté that made the thing so perfect. An older man wouldn’t have dared. Henry had just naturally rushed in. Yes, it was perfect.