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

Heinie Schultz, who was straw-coloured, thin, listlessly patient (Bill Schwartz was the noisy fat one), knew that the thick, yellowish gray hair was to be cut round in the back and the neck shaved beneath it. The beard was to be trimmed delicately, reverently – ‘not cut, just the rags taken off’ – and combed out. Heinie had attended to this hair and beard for sixteen years.

‘Heard a good one,’ murmured Heinie, close to his patron’s ear. ‘There was a bride and groom got on the sleeping car up to Duluth – ’

A thin man of about thirty-five entered the shop, tossed his hat to Pinkie, and dropped into Bill Schwartz’s chair next the window. The new-comer had straight brown hair, worn a little long over ears and collar. His face was freckled, a little pinched, nervously alert. Behind his gold rimmed spectacles his small sharp eyes appeared to be darting this way and that, keen, penetrating through the ordinary comfortable surfaces of life.

This was Robert A. McGibbon, editor and proprietor of the Sunbury Weekly Gleaner. He had appeared in the village hardly six months back with a little money – enough, at least, to buy the presses, give a little for good will, assume the rent and the few business debts that Nicholas Simms Godfrey had been able to contract before his health broke, and to pay his own board at the Wombasts’ on Filbert Avenue. His appearance in local journalism had created a new tension in the village and his appearance now in the barber shop created tension there. Heinie’s vulgar little anecdote froze on his lips. Mr Boice, impassive, heavily deliberate, after one glimpse of the fellow in the long mirror before him, lay back in the chair, gazed straight upward at the fly-specked ceiling.

Mr Boice, when face to face with Robert A. McGibbon on the street, inclined his head to him as to others. But up and down the street his barely expressed disapproval of the man was felt to have a root in feelings and traditions infinitely deeper than the mere natural antagonism to a fresh competitor in the local field.

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