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

7

They stood on the threshold.

‘This is the shop,’ Henry explained, ‘where Hump works.’

‘How perfectly fascinating!’ exclaimed Mrs Henderson. Her quick eyes took in lathes, kites, models of gliders, tools. ‘Bring him ‘straight down here. I won’t stir from this room till he’s explained everything.’

‘Hump!’ called Henry, with austere politeness, up the stairway: ‘Would you mind coming down?’

He came – tall, stooping under the low lintel, in spotless white, distant in manner, but courteous, firmly courteous.

Mrs Henderson, prowling about, lifted a wheel in a frame.

‘What on earth is this thing?’ she asked.

‘A gyroscope.’

‘What do you do with it?’

Humphrey wound a long twine about the handle and set the wheel spinning like a top.

‘Hold it by the handle,’ said he. ‘Now try to wave it around.’

The apparently simple machine swung itself back to the horizontal with a jerk so violent that Mrs Henderson nearly lost her footing. Humphrey, with evident hesitation, caught her elbow and steadied her. She turned her eyes up to his, laughing, all interest.

‘Sit right down in that chair and explain it to me,’ she cried. ‘How on earth did it do that? It’s uncanny.’ And she seated herself on a work-bench, with a light little spring.

When Henry showed Corinne up the stairs, Humphrey was talking with an eager interest that had not before been evident in him. And Mrs Henderson was listening, interrupting him where his easy flow of scientific terms and mechanical axioms ran too fast for her.

Henry’s pulse beat faster. Suddenly the pleasantly arranged old barn looked, felt different. Charm had entered it. And the exciting possibility of fellowship – a daring fellowship. He was up in the living-room now. Corinne was moving lazily, comfortably about, humming a song by the sensational new Richard Strauss who was upsetting all settled musical tradition just then, and prying into corners and shelves. She wore a light, shimmery, silky dress that gave out a faint odour of violets. It drugged Henry, that odour. He felt for the first time as if he belonged in these rooms himself.

Corinne found the kitchen cupboard’, and exclaimed.

‘Mildred!’ she called down the stairs, in her rich drawling voice, ‘come right up here – the cutest thing!’

To which Mildred Henderson coolly replied: —

‘Don’t bother me with cute things now. Play with Henry and keep quiet.’

And Humphrey’s voice droned on down there.

Henry dropped on the piano stool. Corinne was certainly less indifferent. A little.

He struck chords; all he knew. He hummed a phrase of the Colonel’s song in Patience.

Corinne drew a chair to the end of the keyboard and settled herself comfortably. ‘Sing something,’ she said. ‘I love your voice.’

‘It’s no good,’ said he, flushing with delight.

Surely her interest was growing. He added: —

‘I’d a lot rather hear you.’ But then, when she smilingly shook her head, promptly broke into —

‘If you want a receipt for that popular mysteryKnown to the world as a Heavy Dragoon,Take all the remarkable people of history,Rattle them off to a popular tune.’

It is the trickiest and most brilliant patter song ever written, I think, not even excepting the Major General’s song in The Pirates. Which, by the way, Henry sang next.

‘How on earth can you remember all those words!’ Corinne murmured. ‘And the way you get your tongue around them. I could never do it.’

She tried it, with him; but broke down with laughter.

‘I know hundreds of ‘em,’ he said expansively, and sang on.

It was an opportunity he had not foreseen during this dreadful day. But here it was, and he seized it. The stage was set for his kind of things; all at once, as if by the merest accident. For the first time since the awkward Sunday morning on the beach he was able to turn on full the faucet that controlled his ‘charm.’ And he turned it on full. He had parlour tricks. Out of amateur opera experience he had picked up a superficial knack at comedy dancing. He did all he knew. He taught an absurd little team song and dance to Corinne, with Mrs Henderson (who had at last come up) improvising at the piano. And Corinne, flushed and pretty, clung to his hand and laughed herself speechless. Once in her desperate confusion over the steps she sank to the floor and sat in a merry heap until Henry lifted her up. Then Henry imitated Frank Daniels singing ‘The man with an elephant on his hands,’ and H. C. Bamabee singing The Sheriff of Nottingham, and De Wolf Hopper doing Casey at the Bat. All were clever bits; the ‘Casey’ exceptionally so. They applauded him. Even Humphrey, silent now, leaning on an end of the piano, watching Mrs Henderson’s flashing little hands, clapped a little.

Once Humphrey went rather moodily to a window and peered out.

Mrs Henderson followed him; slipped her hand through his arm; asked quietly, ‘Who lives across the alley?’

‘It’s the Presbyterian parsonage,’ he replied, slightly grim.

It was after midnight when they set out, whispering, giggling a little in the alley, for Chestnut Avenue.

‘These sand-flies are fierce,’ said Henry. ‘You girls better take our handkerchiefs.’

They circled on lawns to avoid the swirling, crunching, softly suffocating clouds of insects. Nearer the lake it grew worse. At the corner of Chestnut and Simpson they stopped short. Mrs Henderson, pressing the handkerchief to her face, clung in humorous helplessness to Humphrey’s arm.

He looked down at her. Suddenly he stooped, gathered her up in his arms as if she were a child, and carried her clear through the plague into the shadows of Chestnut Avenue.

Henry, running with Corinne pressing close on his arm, caught a glimpse of his face. The expression on it added a touch of alarm to the pæan of joy in Henry’s brain.

They stepped within the Henderson screen door to say good-night.

‘Let’s do something to-morrow night – walk or go biking or row on the lake,’ said Mrs Henderson. ‘You two had better come down for dinner. Any time after six.’

‘How about you?’ Henry whispered to Corinne. ‘Do you want me to come… Will and Fred…’

Corinne’s firm long hand slipped for a moment into his. He gripped it. The pressure was returned.

‘Don’t be silly!’ she breathed, close to his ear.

8

The sand-flies served as an excuse for silence between Humphrey and Henry on the walk back. Nevertheless, the silence was awkward. It held until they were up in the curiously, hauntingly empty living-room.

Humphrey scraped and lighted his pipe.

Henry, rather surprisingly unhappy again, was moving toward a certain closed door.

‘Tell me,’ said Humphrey gruffly, slowly, ‘where is Mister Arthur V. Henderson?’

‘He travels for the Camman Company, reapers and binders and ploughs.’

Humphrey very deliberately lighted his pipe.

Henry moved on toward the closed door. Emotions were stirring uncomfortably within him. And conflicting impulses. Suddenly he shot out a muffled ‘Good-night,’ and entered the bedroom, shutting the door after him.

An hour later Humphrey – a gaunt figure in nightgown and slippers, pipe in mouth – tapped at that door.

Henry, only half undressed, flushed of face, dripping with sweat, quickly opened it.

Humphrey looked down in surprise at a fully packed trunk and suit-case and a heap of bundles tied with odd bits of twine – sofa cushions, old clothes, what not.

‘What’s all this?’ Humphrey waved his pipe.

‘Well – I just thought I’d go in the morning.’

‘Don’t be a dam’ fool.’

‘But – but’ – Henry threw out protesting hands – ‘I know I’m no good at all these fussy things. I’d just spoil your – ’

The pipe waved again. ‘That’s all disposed of, Hen.’ A somewhat wry smile wrinkled the long face. ‘Mildred Henderson’s running it, apparently. There’s a certain Mrs Olson who is to come in mornings and clean up. And – oh yes, I’ve got a lot of change for you. Your share was only eight-five cents.’

There was a long silence. Henry looked at his feet; moved one of them slowly about on the floor.

‘We’re different kinds,’ said Humphrey. ‘About as different as they make’em. But that, in itself, isn’t a bad thing.’

He thrust out his hand.

Henry clasped it; gulped down an all but uncontrollable uprush of feeling; looked down again.

Humphrey stalked back to his room.

Thus began the odd partnership of Weaver and Calverly. Though is not every partnership a little odd?

III – THE STIMULANT

1

Miss Wombast looked up from her desk in the Sunbury Public Library and beheld Henry Calverly, 3rd. Then with a slight fluttering of her pale, blue-veined eyelids and a compression of her thin lips she looked down again and in a neat practised librarian’s hand finished printing out a title on the-catalogue card before her.

For Henry Calverly was faintly disconcerting to her. Though it was only eleven o’clock, and a Tuesday, he was attired in blue serge coat, snow white trousers and (could she have seen through the desk) white stockings and shoes. His white négligé shirt was decorated at the neck with a ‘four-in-hand’ of shimmering foulard, blue and green. In his left hand was a rolled-up creamy-white felt hat and the crook of a thin bamboo stick. With his right he fussed at the fringe on his upper lip, which was somewhat nearer the moustache stage than it had been last week. Behind his nose glasses and their pendant silk cord his face was sober; the gray-blue eyes that (Miss Wombast knew) could blaze with primal energy were gloomy, or at least tired; there was a furrow between his blond eyebrow’s. He had the air of a youth who wants earnestly to concentrate without knowing quite how.

Miss Wombast was a distinctly ‘literary’ person. She read Meredith, Balzac, De Maupassant, Flaubert, Zola, and Howells. She was living her way into the developing later manner of Henry James. She talked, on occasion, with an icy enthusiasm that many honest folk found irritating, of Stevenson’s style and of Walter Pater.

It was Miss Wombast’s habit to look in her books for complete identification of the living characters she met. She studied all of them, coolly, critically, at boardinghouse and library. Naturally, when a living individual refused to take his place among her gallery of book types, she was puzzled. One such was Henry Calverly.

She had known something of his checkered career in high school, where he had directed the glee club, founded and edited The Boys’ Journal, written a rather bright one-act play for the junior class. Indeed the village in general had been mildly aware of Henry. He had stood out, and Miss Wombast herself had sung a modest alto in the Iolanthe chorus, two years back, under Henry’s direction and had found him impersonally, ingenuously masterful and a subtly pleasing factor in her thought-world. He had made a success of that mob. The big men of the village gave him a dinner and a purse of gold. After all of which, his mother had died, he had run, apparently, through his gifts and his earnings, and settled down to a curiously petty reporting job, trotting up and down Simpson Street collecting useless little items for The Weekly Voice of Sunbury. Other young fellows of twenty either went to college or started laying the foundations of a regular job in Chicago. Those that amounted to anything. You could see pretty plainly ahead of each his proper line of development. Yet here was Henry, who had stood out, working half-heartedly at the sort of job you associated with the off-time of poor students, dressing altogether too conspicuously, wasting hours – daytimes, when a young fellow ought to be working – with this girl and that. For a long time it had been the Caldwell girl. Lately she had seen him with that strikingly pretty but, she felt, rather ‘physical’ young singer who was visiting the gifted but whispered-about Mrs Arthur V. Henderson, of Lower Chestnut Avenue. Name of Doge, or Doag, or something like that.

Henry himself had been whispered about. Very recently. He had been seen at Hoffmann’s Garden, up the shore, with a vulgar young woman in extremely tight bloomers. Of the working girl type. Had her out on a tandem. Drinking beer.

So it was, unable to forget those secretly stirring Iolanthe days, that Miss Wombast had looked about among her book types for a key to Henry, but without success. He didn’t appear to be in De Maupassant. Nor in Balzac. In Meredith and James there was no one who said ‘Yeah’ and ‘Gotta’ and spoke with the crude if honest throat ‘r’ of the Middle West and went with nice girls and vulgar girls and carried that silly cane and wore the sillier moustache; who had, or had had, gifts of creation and command, yet now, month in, month out, hung about Donovan’s soda fountain; who never smoked and, apart from the Hoffmann’s Garden incident, wasn’t known to drink; and who, when you faced him, despite the massed evidence, gave out an impression of earnest endeavour. Even of moral purpose.

Had she known him better Miss Wombast would have found herself the more puzzled. For Miss Wombast, despite her rather complicated reading, still clung in some measure to the moralistic teachings of her youth, believing that people either had what she thought of as character or else didn’t have it, that people were either industrious or lazy, bright or stupid, vulgar or nice. Therefore the fact that Henry, while still wrecking his stomach with fountain drinks and (a recently acquired habit) with lemon meringue pie between meals, had not touched candy for two years – not a chocolate cream, not even a gum drop! – and this by sheer force of character, would have been confusing.

And to read his thoughts, as he stood there before her desk, would have carried her confusion on into bewilderment.

Mostly these thoughts had to do with money, and bordered on the desperate. Tentative little schemes for getting money – even a few dollars – were forming and dissolving rapidly in his mind.

He was concerned because his sudden little flirtation with Corinne Doag, after a flashing start, had lost its glow. Only the preceding evening. He hadn’t held her interest. The thrill had gone. Which plunged him into moods and brought to his always unruly tongue the sarcastic words that made matters worse. He was lunching down there to-day – he and Humphrey – and dreaded it, with moments of a rather futile, flickering hope. Deep intuition informed him that the one sure solution was money. You couldn’t get on with a girl without it. Just about so far, then things dragged. And this, of course, brought him around the circle, back to the main topic.

He was thinking about his clothes. They, at least, should move Corinne. Along with the moustache, the cane, the cord on his glasses. He didn’t see how people could help being a little impressed. Miss Wombast, even, who didn’t matter. It seemed to him that she was impressed.

He was thinking about Martha Caldwell., She was pretty frankly going with James B. Merchant, Jr., now. Henry was jealous of James B. Merchant, Jr. And about Martha his thoughts hovered with a tinge of romantic sadness. He would like her to see him to-day, in these clothes, with his moustache and cane.

He was wondering, with the dread that the prospect of mental effort always roused in him, how on earth he was ever to write three whole columns about the Annual Business Men’s Picnic of the preceding afternoon. Describing in humorous yet friendly detail the three-legged race, the ball game between the fats and the leans, the dinner in the grove, the concert by Foote’s full band of twenty pieces, the purse given to Charlie Waterhouse as the most popular man on Simpson Street. He had a thick wad of notes up at the rooms, but his heart was not in the laborious task of expanding them. He knew precisely what old man Boice expected of him – plenty of ‘personal mention’ for all the advertisers, giving space for space. Each day that he put it off would make the task harder. If he didn’t have the complete story in by Thursday night, Humphrey would skin him alive; yet here it was Wednesday morning, and he was planning to spend as much of the day as possible with the increasingly unresponsive Corinne. Life was difficult!

He was aware of a morbid craving in his digestive tract. He decided to get an ice-cream soda on the way back to the office. He would have liked about half a pound of chocolate creams. The Italian kind, with all the sweet in the white part. But here character intervened.

A corner of his mind dwelt unceasingly on queer difficult feelings that came. These had flared out in the unpleasant incident of Mamie Wilcox and the tandem; and again in the present flirtation with Corinne. In a way that he found perplexing, this stir of emotion was related to his gifts. He couldn’t let one go without the other. There had been moments – in the old days – when a feeling of power had surged through him. It was a wonderful, irresistible feeling. Riding that wave, he was equal to anything. But it had frightened him. The memory of it frightened him now. He had put Iolanthe through, it was true, but he had also nearly eloped with Ernestine Lambert. He had completely lost his head – debts, everything!

Yes, it was as well that Miss Wombast couldn’t read his thoughts. She wouldn’t have known how to interpret them. She hadn’t the capacity to understand the wide swift stream of feeling down which an imaginative boy floats all but rudderless into manhood. She couldn’t know of his pitifully inadequate little attempts to shape a course, to catch this breeze and that, even to square around and breast the current of life.

Henry said politely: —

‘Good-morning, Miss Wombast. I just looked in for the notes of new books.’

‘Oh,’ she replied quickly. ‘I’m sorry you troubled. Mr Boice asked me to mail it to the office at the end of the month. I just sent it – this morning.’

She saw his face fall. He mumbled something that sounded like, ‘Oh – all right! Doesn’t matter.’ For a moment he stood waving his stick in jerky, aimless little circles. Then went off down the stairs.

2

Emerging from Donovan’s drug store Henry encountered the ponderous person of old Boice – six feet an inch and a half, head sunk a little between the shoulders, thick yellowish-white whiskers waving down over a black bow tie and a spotted, roundly protruding vest, a heavy old watch chain with insignia of a fraternal order hanging as a charm; inscrutable, washed-out blue eyes in a deeply lined but nearly expressionless face.

Henry stopped short; stared at his employer.

Mr Boice did not stop. But as he moved deliberately by, his faded eyes took in every detail of Henry’s not unremarkable personal appearance.

Henry was thinking: ‘Old crook. Wish I had a paper of my own here and I’d get back at him. Run him out of town, that’s what!’ And after he had nodded and rushed by, his colouring mounting: ‘Like to know why I should work my head off just to make money for him. No sense in that!’

Henry came moodily into the Voice office, dropped down at his inkstained, littered table behind the railing, and sighed twice. He picked up a pencil and fell to outlining ink spots.

The sighs were directed at Humphrey, who sat bent over his desk, cob pipe in mouth, writing very rapidly. ‘He’s got wonderful concentration,’ thought Henry, his mind wandering a brief moment from his unhappy self.

Humphrey spoke without looking up. ‘Don’t let that Business Men’s Picnic get away from you, Hen. Really ought to be getting it in type now. Two compositors loafing out there.’

Henry sighed again; let his pencil fall on the table; gazed heavily, helplessly at the wall…

‘Old man say anything to you about the “Library Notes”?’

Humphrey glanced up and removed his pipe. His swarthy long face wrinkled thoughtfully. ‘Yes. Just now. He’s going to have Miss Wombast send ‘em in direct every month.’

‘And I don’t have ‘em any more.’

Humphrey considered this fact. ‘It doesn’t amount to very much, Hen.’

‘Oh, no – works out about sixty cents to a dollar. It ain’t that altogether – it’s the principle. I’m getting tired of it!’

The press-room door was ajar, Humphrey reached out and closed it.

Henry raised his voice; got out of his chair and sat on the edge of the table. His eyes brightened sharply. Emotion crept into his voice and shook it a little.

‘Do you know what’s he done to me – that old doubleface? Took me in here two years ago at eight a week with a promise of nine if I suited. Well, I did suit. But did I get the nine? Not until I’d rowed and begged for seven months. A year of that, a lot more work – You know! “Club Notes,” this library stuff, “Real Estate Happenings,” “Along Simpson Street,” reading proof – ’

Humphrey slowly nodded as he smoked.

‘ – And I asked for ten a week. Would he give it? No! I knew I was worth more than that, so I offered to take space rates instead. Then what does he do? You know, Hump. Been clipping me off, one thing after another, and piling on the proof and the office work. Here’s one thing more gone to-day. Last week my string was exactly seven dollars and forty-six cents. Dam it, it ain’t fair! I can’t live! I won’t stand it. Gotta be ten a week or I – I’ll find out why. Show-down.’

He rushed to the door. Then, as if his little flare of indignation had burnt out, fingered there, knitting his brows and looking up and down the street and across at the long veranda of the Sunbury House, where people sat in a row in yellow rocking chairs.

Humphrey smoked and considered him. After a little he remarked quietly: —

‘Look here, Hen, I don’t like it any more than you do. I’ve seen what he was doing. I’ve tried to forestall him once or twice – ’

‘I know it, Hump.’ Henry turned. He was quite listless now. ‘He’s a tricky old fox. If I only knew of something else I could do – or that we could do together – ’

‘But – this was what I was going to say – no matter how we feel, I’m going to be really in trouble if I don’t get that picnic story pretty soon. Mr Boice asked about it this morning.’

Henry leaned against Mr Boice’s desk, up by the window; dropped his chin into one hand.

‘I’ll do it, Hump. This afternoon. Or to-night. We’re going down to Mildred’s this noon, of course.’

‘That’s part of what’s bothering me. God knows how soon after that you’ll break away from Corinne.’

‘Pretty dam soon,’ remarked Henry sullenly, ‘the way things are going now… I’ll get at it, Hump. Honest I will. But right now’ – he moved a hand weakly through the air – ‘I just couldn’t. You don’t know how I feel. I couldn’t!’

‘Where you going now?’

‘I don’t know.’ The hand moved again. ‘Walk around. Gotta be by myself. Sorta think it out. This is one of the days… I’ve been thinking – be twenty-one in November. Then I’ll show him, and all the rest of ‘em. Have a little money then. I’ll show this hypocritical old town a few things – a few things…’

His voice died to a mumble. He felt with limp fingers at his moustache.

‘I’ll be ready quarter or twenty minutes past twelve,’ Humphrey called after him as he moved mournfully out to the street.

3

Mr Boice moved heavily along, inclining his massive head, without a smile, to this acquaintance and that, and turned in at Schultz and Schwartz’s.

The spectacle of Henry Calverly – in spotless white and blue, with the moustache, and the stick – had irritated him. Deeply. A boy who couldn’t earn eight dollars a week parading Simpson Street in that rig, on a week-day morning! He felt strongly that Henry had no business sticking out that way, above the village level. Hitting you in the eyes. Young Jenkins was bad enough, but at least his father had the money. Real money. And could let his son waste it if he chose. But a conceited young chump like Henry Calverly! Ought to be chucked into a factory somewhere. Stoke a furnace. Carry boxes. Work with his hands. Get down to brass tacks and see if he had any stuff in him. Doubtful.

Mr Boice made a low sound, a wheezy sound between a grunt and a hum, as he handed his hat to the black, muscular, bullet-headed, grinning Pinkie Potter, who specialised in hats and shoes in Sunbury’s leading barber shop.

He made another sound that was quite a grunt as he sank into the red plush barber chair of Heinie Schultz. His massive frame was clumsy, and the twinges of lumbago, varied by touches of neuritis, that had come steadily upon him since middle life, added to the difficulties of moving it about. He always made these sounds. He would stop on the street, take your hand non-committally in his huge, rather limp paw, and grunt before he spoke, between phrases, and when moving away.