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

Bob McGibbon was a hustler. And his nervous quickness of perception had brought him a few small successes and was to bring him larger ones. His Sunbury disaster was perhaps later to be charged to education.

The roots of that particular failure went deep. From first to last his attitude was that of a New Yorker in a small town. He outraged every local prejudice; he alienated, one by one, each friendly influence. He couldn’t understand that any such village as Sunbury resents the outsider who insists on pointing out its little human failings. It was recognised here and there as possible that old man Boice and Mr Weston of the bank might be covering up something in the matter of the genial town treasurer; but there was reason enough to believe that Mr Boice and Mr Weston knew pretty well what they were about. That, at least, was the rather equivocal position into which McGibbon by his very energy and assertiveness, drove many a ruffled citizen.

And it had needed very little urging on the part of the three leading citizens (McGibbon had a trick of referring to them in his paper as ‘the Old Cinch’) to bring about the boycott on the part of the Simpson Street and South Sunbury advertisers. As Charlie Waterhouse himself put it: —

‘It ain’t what he says about me. I can stand it. Man to man I can attend to him. The thing is, he’s hurtin’ the town. That’s it – he’s hurtin’ the town.’

3

I have spoken of McGibbon’s perception. He knew before reading three paragraphs that Henry had a touch of genius. Before finishing A Kerbstone Barmecide he knew – knew with a mental grasp that was pitifully wasted on the petty business of a country weekly – that nothing comparable had appeared anywhere in the English-speaking world since Plain Tales from the Hills and Soldiers Three. He knew, further, what no Sunbury seems ever able to recognise, that it is your occasional Henry who, as he mentally put it, ‘rings the bell.’ A queer young man, slightly dudish in dress, unable to fit in any conventional job, unable really to fall into step with his generation, blunderingly but incorrigibly a non-conformist, a moodily earnest yet absurdly susceptible young man, slightly self-conscious, known here and there among those of his age as ‘sarcastic,’ brilliant occasionally, dogged some of the time, dreamy and irresponsible the rest, yet with charm. A youth who not infrequently was guilty of queer, rather unsocial acts; not of meanness or unkindness, rather of an inability to feel with and for others, to fit. A youth destined to work out his salvation, if at all, alone.

Yes, McGibbon read the signs shrewdly. For which Sunbury owes that erratic editor a small debt that remains unpaid and unrecorded to-day. No doubt that McGibbon brought him out. Encouraged him, spurred him, held him to it.

It was tradition in Sunbury that the two weekly papers should come decorously into the world each Saturday morning for the first delivery of mail. A small pile of each, toward noon was put on sale in Jackson’s book store (formerly B. F. Jones’s). That was all.

And that was why McGibbon was able, on this Saturday of our story, to shake the town.

Poor old Sunbury was shaken heavily and often that summer. First by the Mamie Wilcox scandal. The sort of thing that didn’t, couldn’t happen. Men leaving town, and all that. A miserable, hastily contrived marriage. Henry’s name dragged in, unjustly (as it happened), but convincingly. Though Henry always worked best after some sort of a blow. He had to be shaken out of himself. I think. It isn’t likely that he could or would have written Satraps of the Simple if this particular blow hadn’t fallen. It was a feverish job. He was stung, quivering, helpless. And then his great gift functioned.

Then Madame Watt happened to Sunbury. And shook the village to its roots.

And then came Bob McGibbon’s last and mightiest effort.

When all commuting Sunbury converged on the old red brick ‘depot’ that morning for the seven-eleven and the seven forty-six and the eight-three and the eight-twenty-nine, hoarsely bellowing newsboys held the two ends of the platform. They wore cotton caps with ‘The Weekly Gleaner’ printed around the front. They were big, deep-throated roughs, the sort that shout ‘extras’ through the cities. They crowded the local newsdealer, little Mr Beamer, back into one of the waiting-rooms.

They fairly intimidated the town. People bought the Gleaner in self-defence, even boarded trains and rode off to Chicago without their regular Tribune or Record or Inter Ocean.

Other newsmen roamed the shady, pleasant residence streets, bellowing. Housewives, old gentlemen, servants, hurried out to buy.

There were posters on the fences, and, along the billboards from Rockwell Park on the south to Borea on the north. McGibbon actually rented the space from the Northern Billboard Company. And there were newsmen with caps, in the afternoon, attacking the North Shore home-comers in the Chicago station, the very heart of things. All this – posters screaming like the news-men; big wood type, red and black – to advertise Sinbad the Treasurer and the rest of the long series and Henry Calverly.

‘Attack’ is the word. McGibbon was assaulting the town and the region as it had hardly been assaulted before. If it was his last, it was surely his most outrageous act from the local point of view. People talked, boiled, raged. The blatancy of the thing irritated them to the point of impotent mutterings. They were helpless. McGibbon was breaking no laws. He was stirring them, however feverish his condition of mind, with deliberate intent. It was his notion of advertising. Reaching the mark, regardless of obstacles, indifference, difficulties. And had his personal circumstances been less harrowing he could have chuckled happily at the result.

The noise fell upon the ear drums of Charlie Waterhouse as he walked down-town. A ragged, red-faced pirate thrust a Gleaner into his hand, snatched his nickel, and rushed off, bellowing.

Charlie began reading Sinbad the Treasurer as he walked. He finished it standing on the turf by the sidewalk, ignoring passing acquaintances, nervously biting and mouthing a cigar that had gone out. In the same condition he read bits of it again. He stood for a while, wavering; then went back home, and spoke roughly to Mrs Waterhouse when she asked him why. He hid the paper from her, to no particular purpose. He didn’t appear at the town hall all day, but caught a trolley into Chicago and went to a dime museum. Later in the day he was seen by two venturesome youths sitting alone in the rear of a stage box at Sam T. Jack’s.

Norton P. Boice became aware of the sensation on his familiar way to the Voice office.

Humphrey, at his own editorial desk behind the railing, waited, apparently buried in galley proofs, for the explosion. He had caught it all after leaving Henry at Stanley’s door, and had prowled a bit, taking it in.

But Mr Boice simply made little sounds – ‘Hmm!’ and ‘mmp!’ and ‘Hmm!’ again. Then, slowly lifting his ponderous figure, the upper half of his face expressionless as always above his long yellowish-white beard, went out.

For an hour he was shut up with Mr Weston in the director’s room at the bank; his huge bulk disposed in an armchair; little, low-voiced, neatly bearded Mr Weston standing by the mantel. It came down to this: —

‘Could throw him into bankruptcy. He must be about broke.’

Thus Boice. ‘We’d get the stories that way. Suppress ‘em.’

The old gentleman was still wincing from the artlessly subtle stabs he had suffered a week back in The Caliph of Simpson Street. Everybody within four miles of the postoffice knew who the Caliph was. He had caught people hiding their smiles. Mentally he was considering a new drawn head for the Voice, with the phrase ‘And The Weekly Gleaner’ neatly printed just below. There never had been room for two papers in Sunbury anyway.

Mr Weston was shaking his head. ‘May as well sit tight, Nort. What harm’s to be done, is done already. He’ll have to come down. We’ll get him then.’

‘You haven’t got any of his paper here, have you?’

‘There was one note. I called that some time ago.’

‘Wha’d he do?’

‘Paid it. He seems still to have a little something. But he can’t last. Not without advertising.’

‘But he’s selling his paper fast. If he can keep that up maybe he’ll begin to pick up a little along the street.’

Mr Weston was still shaking his head. ‘Better wait, Nort.’

‘No, I’ll offer him a few hundred. The old Gleaner plant’s worth something.’

‘Of course, there’s no harm in that.’

So Mr Boice crossed the street to Hemple’s market and laboriously lifted his great body up the stairway beside it to the quarters of the Gleaner upstairs, where a coatless, rumpled, rather wild-eyed McGibbon listened to him and then, with suspiciously, alert and smiling politeness, showed him out and down again.

4

The sensation struck Henry, full face, in the barber shop, Schütz and Schwartz’s, whither he went from Stanley’s. Professor Hennis, of the English department at the university, met him at the door and insisted on shaking hands.

‘These sketches of yours, Calverly – the two I have read – are remarkable. There is a freshness of characterisation that suggests Chaucer to me. Sunbury will live to be proud of you.’

This left Henry red and mumbling, rather dumbfounded.

Then, in the chair, Bill Schwartz – fat, exuberant – said, bending over him: —

‘Well, how does it feel to be famous, Henry?’ And added, ‘You’ve got ‘em excited along the street here. Henry Berger says Charlie Waterhouse’ll punch your head before night. Says he’ll have to. Can’t sue very well.’

It was after this and a few other evidences of the stir he was causing that Henry, as Humphrey had done a half-hour earlier, went prowling. He watched and followed the bellowing newsmen. He observed the lively scene at the depot when the nine-three train pulled out, from the cluttered-up window of Murphy’s cigar store.

Then, keeping off Simpson Street, which was by this time crowded with the Saturday morning shopping, he slipped around Hemple’s corner and up the stairs.

McGibbon sat alone in the front office – coat off, vest open, longish hair tousled, a lock straggling down across his high forehead, eyes strained and staring. He was deep in his swivel chair; long legs stretched out under the desk, smoking a five-cent cigar, hands deep in pockets.

He greeted Henry with a wry, thin-lipped smile, and waved his cigar.

‘Great days!’ he remarked dryly. ‘Gee!’ Henry dropped into a chair, laid his bamboo stick on the table, mopped a glistening face. ‘Gee! You do know how to get’em going!’

The cigar waved again.

‘Sure! Stir’em up! Soak it to’em! Only way.’

‘Everybody’s buying it.’

‘Rather! You’re a hit, son!’

‘Oh, I don’t know’s I’d say that.’

‘Rats! You’re a knockout. Never been anything like it. Two months of it and they’d be throwing your name around in Union Square, N.Y. If we only had the two months.’ He sighed.

‘Why!’ Henry, all nerves, caught his expression. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘We’re-out of paper.’

‘You mean to print on?’

A nod. ‘And we’re out of money to buy more.’

‘But with this big sale – ’

‘Costing four ‘n’ one-half times what we take in.’

‘But I don’t see – ’

‘Don’t you? That’s business, Hen. That’s this world. You pour your money in – whip up your sales – drive, drive, drive! After a while it goes of itself and you get your money back. Scads of it. You’re rich. That’s the way with every young business. Takes nerve I tell you, and vision! Why, I know stories of the early days of – look here, what we need is money. Got to have it. Right now, while they’re on the run. If we can’t get it, and get it quick, well’ – he reached deliberately forward, picked up a copy of the Gleaner and waved it high – ‘that – that, my son, is the last copy of the Gleaner!’

Henry stared with burning eyes out of a white face.

‘But my stories!’ he cried.

‘They go to the man that gets the paper. If we land in bankruptcy, as we doubtless shall, they will be held by the court as assets.’

‘But they’re mine!’ A note of bewilderment that was despair was in Henry’s voice.

McGibbon shook his head.

‘No, Hen. We’re known to have them. They’re in type here. You’re helpless. We’re both helpless. The thousand dollars you put in, too. You hold my note for that. You’ll get so many cents on the dollar when the plant is sold at auction. Or if Boice buys it. He was up here just now. Offered me five hundred dollars. Think of it – five hundred for our plant, the big press and everything.’

‘Wha – wha’d you say?’

‘Showed him out. Laughed at him. Of course! But it was just a play. Never. Now look here, Hen, you’ve got a little more, haven’t you? Your uncle – ’

Henry had reached the limits of his emotional capacity.’ He was far beyond the familiar mental process known as thinking. He was sitting on the edge of his chair, knees drawn up, hands clasped tightly, temples drumming, a flush spreading down over his cheeks.

But even in this condition, thoughts came.

One of these – or perhaps it was just a feeling, a manifestation of a sort of instinct – was of hostility to Bob here. It. brought a touch of guilty discomfort – hostility came hard, with Henry – yet it was distinctly there. Bob was doubtless right. All his experience. And his wonderful fighting nerve. Yet somehow he wouldn’t do.

‘No!’ said Henry. And again, ‘No! Not a cent from my uncle!’

McGibbon’s hand still held up the paper. He brought it down now with a bang. On the desk. And sprang up, speaking louder, with quick, intense gestures.

‘You don’t seem to get it, Hen!’ he cried. ‘We’re through – broke!’ He glanced around at the press-room door and controlled his voice. ‘No pay-roll – nothing! Nothing for the boys out there – or me – or you. I’ve been sitting here wondering how I can tell’em. Got to.’

‘Nothing!’ Henry echoed weakly, fumbling at his Little moustache – ‘for me?’

‘Not a cent.’

‘But – but – ’ Henry’s earthly wealth at the moment was about forty cents. His rough estimate of immediate expenditures was considerable.

‘Got to have money now, Hen! To-day. Before night. Can’t you get hold of that fact? Even a hundred – the pay-roll’s only ninety-six-fifty. If I could handle that, likely I could make a turn next week and get our paper stock in time.’

Henry heard his own voice saying: —

‘But don’t business men borrow – ’

‘Borrow! Me? In this town? They wouldn’t lend me the rope to hang myself with… Hold on there, Hen – ’

For the young man had picked up his stick and was moving toward the door. And as he hurried out he was saving, without looking back: —

‘No… No!’

He said it on the stairs, where none could hear. He rushed around the corner, around the block. Anything to keep off Simpson Street. He had a really rather desperate struggle to keep from talking his heart out – aloud – in the street – angrily – attacking Boice, Weston, and McGibbon in the same breath. His feeling against McGibbon amounted to bitterness now. But his feeling against old Boice had risen to the borders of rage. He thought of that silent, ponderous old man, sitting at his desk in the post-office, like a spider weaving his subtle web about the town, where helpless little human flies crawled innocently about their uninspired daily tasks.

So Mr Boice had offered five hundred for plant, good will, and the stories!

No mere legal, technical claim on those stories as property, as assets, held the slightest interest for Henry. He couldn’t understand that. They were his. He had created them, made them out of nothing – just a few one-cent lead pencils and a lot of copy paper. Bob had snatched them away to print them in the Gleaner. But they weren’t Bob’s.

‘They’re mine!’ he said aloud. ‘They’re mine! Old Boice shan’t have them! Never!’ He caught himself then; looked about sharply, all hot emotion and tingling nerves.

5

A little later – it was getting on toward noon – he found himself on Filbert Avenue approaching Simpson Street. Without plan or guidance, he was heading northward, toward the rooms. It would be necessary to cross Simpson Street. He was fighting down the impulse to go several blocks to the east, toward the lake, where the stores and shops gave place to homes and lawns and shade trees, where he could slip across unnoticed; but his feet were leading him straight toward the corner of Filbert and Simpson, the busiest, most conspicuous corner in town, where were the hotel and Berger’s grocery and, only a few doors off, Donovan’s drug store and Swanson’s flower shop and Duneen’s general store and the Voice office. It had come down, the warfare within him, to a question of proving to himself that he wasn’t a coward, that he could face disaster, even the complete disaster that seemed now to be upon him. It was like the end of the world.

In a pocket his fingers were tightly clasped about the anonymous note that had been the cloud over his troubled sleep of the night and his gloomy awakening of the morning. The note was now but a detail in the general crash. He decided to press on, march straight across Simpson Street, head high. He even brought out the note from his pocket; held it in his hand as he walked stiffly on. It was a somewhat bitter touch of bravado, but I find I like Henry none the less for it.

A little way short of the corner, it must be recorded, he faltered. It was by Berger’s rear door. There was a gate in the fence here, that now stood open. Two of the Berger delivery wagons were backed in there. And right by the gate Henry Berger himself, his ample person enveloped in a long white apron, was opening a crate.

Henry sensed him there; flushed (for it seemed that he could not speak to any human being now) and wrestled, in painful impotence of will, with the idea of moving on.

But then, through a slow moment after Mr Berger said, ‘How are you, Henry!’ he sensed something further; a note of good nature in the voice, a feeling that the man was smiling, a suggestion that all the genial quality had not, after all, been hardened out of life.

He turned; pulled at his moustache (paper in hand), and flicked at weeds with his stick.

Mr Berger was smiling. He drew his hand across a sweaty brow; shook the hand; then leaned on his hatchet.

‘Getting hot,’ he remarked.

Henry tried to reply, but found himself still inarticulate.

‘Old Boice is getting after you. Plenty.’

Henry winced; but felt slightly reassured when Mr Berger chuckled. All intercourse with Mr Berger was tempered, however, by the memory that Henry had been caught, within the decade, stealing fruit from the cases out front.

‘He was just here. Don’t mind telling you that he’s trying to get McGibbon’s creditors together and throw him into bankruptcy. Doesn’t look as if there was enough out against him, though. Got to be five hundred. It ain’t as if he had a family and was running up bills. Just living alone at the Wombasts, like he does. But old Boice is out gunning for fair. Never saw him quite like this. First it was the advertising boycott…’

Henry was shifting his weight from foot to foot.

‘Well,’ he said now, ‘I guess I’d better be getting along.’

‘I was just going to say, Henry, that you’ve give me a good laugh. Keep on like this and you’ll be famous some day… And say! Hold on a minute! I don’t know’s you’re in a position to do anything about it, but I was just going to say, I rather guess the old Gleaner could be picked up for next to nothing right now. And there’s folks here that ain’t so anxious to see Boice get the market all to hisself. Not so dam anxious… Wait a minute! I mean, I guess once McGibbon was got rid of the Old Boy’d find it wouldn’t be so easy to hold this boycott together. There’s folks that would break away – Well, that’s about all that was on my mind. Only I’d sorta hate to see your yarns suppressed. They’re grand reading, Henry. My wife like to ‘a’ died over that one last week —The Sultan of Simpson Street.’

‘“Caliph!”’ said Henry, with a nervous eagerness. ‘The Caliph of Simpson Street.’

‘Touched up old Norton P. for fair. Made him sorer ‘n a goat. My wife’s literary, and she says it’s worthy of Poe. And you ought to hear the people talking to-day about this new one.’

‘Sinbad the Treasurer!’ said Henry quickly, fearing another misquotation:

‘Yay-ah. That. Ain’t had time to read it yet myself. They say it’s great.’

‘Well – good-bye,’ said Henry, and moved stiffly away toward the corner.

‘Funny!’ mused the grocer,’ looking after him. ‘These geniuses never have any business sense. I give him a real opening there.’

6

Simpson Street was always crowded of a Saturday morning with thoughtful housewives. The grocers and butchers bustled about. The rows of display racks along the sidewalk were heaped with fresh vegetables and fruits.

The majority of the shoppers came afoot, but the kerb was lined with buggies, surries, neat station wagons and dog-carts, crowded in between the delivery wagons. Sunbury boasted, as well, a number of Stanhopes, a barouche or two, and several landaus. The Jenkins family, among its several members, had a stable full of horses and ponies. William B. Snow owned a valuable chestnut team with silver-mounted harness. Here and there along the street one might have seen, on this occasion, several vehicles that might well have been described as smart.

But Sunbury had never seen anything like the equipage that, at a quarter to twelve – a little late for selective shopping in those days – came rolling smoothly, silently, on its rubber-shod wheels across the tracks and past the post-office, Nelson’s bakery, the Sunbury National Bank, Duneen’s and Donovan’s to Swanson’s flower shop.

Never, never had Sunbury seen anything quite like that. Mr Berger, hurrying through to the front of his store, stopped short, stared out across the street and after a breathless moment breathed the words, ‘Holy Smoke!’ Women stood motionless, holding heads of lettuce, boxes of raspberries and what not, and gazed in an amazement that was actually long minutes in reaching the normal mental state of critical appraisal.

The carriage was a Victoria, hung very low, varnished work glistening brilliantly in the sunshine. It was upholstered conspicuously in plum colour. The horses were jet black, glossy, perfectly matched, checked up so high that the necks arched prettily if uncomfortably; and they had docked tails. The harness they wore was mounted with a display of silver that made the silver on William B. Snow’s team, standing just below Donovan’s, look outright inconspicuous.

Leaning back in luxurious comfort as the carriage came so softly along the street, holding up a parasol of black lace, overshadowing her niece, pretty little Cicely Hamlin, who sat beside her, Madame Watt, her large person dressed with costly simplicity in black with a touch of colour at the throat, square of face, with an emphatic chin, a strongly hooked nose, penetrating black eyes, surveyed the street with a commanding dignity, an assertive dignity, if the phrase may be used. Or it may have been that a touch of self-consciousness within her showed through the enveloping dignity and made you think about it. Certainly there was a final outstanding reason for self-consciousness, even in the case of Madame Watt; for on the high box in front visible for blocks above the traffic of the street, sat, in wooden perfection as in plum-coloured livery, side by side, a coachman and a footman.

At Swanson’s the footman leaped nimbly down and stood rigid by the step while Madame heavily descended and passed across the walk and into the shop.

The street lifted. Women’s tongues moved briskly. Trade was resumed.

A pretty girl in the most wonderful carriage ever seen – a new girl, at that, bringing a stir of quickened interest to the younger set – is a magnet of considerable attracting power. Young people appeared – from nowhere, it seemed – and clustered about the carriage. Two couples hurried from the soda fountain in Donovan’s. The de Casselles boys were passing on their way from the Country Club courts (which were still on the old grounds, down near the lake) in blazer coats and with expensive rackets in wooden presses. Alfred Knight was out collecting for the bank, and happened to be near. Mary Ames and Jane Bellman came over from Berger’s, where Mary was scrutinising cauliflowers with a cool eye.