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

1

It was late May in Sunbury, Illinois, and twenty minutes past eight in the morning.

The spacious lawns and the wide strips of turf between sidewalk and roadway in every avenue and street were lush with crowding young blades of green. The maples, oaks, and elms were vivid with the exuberant youth of the year.

Throughout the village, brisk young men, care-worn men of middle age, a few elderly men were hurrying toward the old red-brick station whence the eight-twenty-nine would shortly carry them into the dust and sweat and smoke of a business day in Chicago. The swarms of sleepy-eyed clerks, book-keepers, office boys and girl stenographers had gone in on the seven-eleven and the seven-thirty-two.

Along Simpson Street the grocers, in their aprons, already had out their sidewalk racks heaped with seasonable vegetables and fruits (out-of-season delicacies had not then become commonplaces of life in Sunbury; strawberries appeared when the local berries were ripe, not sooner). The two butcher shops were decorated with red and buff carcasses hung in rows. A whistling, coatless youth had just swept out Donovan’s drug store and was wiping off the marble counter before the marble and glass soda fountain. Through the windows of the Sunbury National Bank Alfred Knight could be seen filling the inkwells and putting out fresh blotters and pens. The neat little restaurant known as ‘Stanley’s’ (the Stanleys were a respectable coloured couple) was still nearly full of men who ate ham and eggs, pounded beefsteak, fried potatoes, and buckwheat cakes, and drank huge cups of gray-brown coffee; with, at the rear tables, two or three family groups. And from numerous boarding-houses and dormitories in the northern section of the overgrown village students of both sexes were converging on the oak-shaded campus by the lake.

All of Sunbury appeared to be up and about the business of the day; all, perhaps, except Henry Calverly, 3rd, who sat, dressed except for his coat, heavy-eyed, a hair brush in either hand, hands resting limp on knees, on the edge of his narrow iron bed. This, in Mrs Wilcox’s boardinghouse in Douglass Street, one block south of Simpson; top floor.

If the present reader has, by chance, had earlier acquaintance with Henry, it should be explained that he is now to be pictured not as a youth of eighteen going on nineteen but as a young man of twenty going on twenty-one.

That figure, twenty-one, of significance in the secret thoughts of any growing boy, was of peculiar, stirring significance to the sensitive, imaginative Henry. It marked the beginning of what is sometimes termed Life. It suggested alarming but interesting responsibilities. On that day, beginning with the stroke of the midnight hour, guardians ceased to function and independence set in. One was a citizen. One voted. In Henry’s case, the crowning symbol of manhood would be deferred a year, as Election Day was to fall on the fifth of November and his birthday was the seventh; but that so trivial a mere fact bore small weight in the face of potential citizenship might have been indicated by the faint blonde fringe along his upper lip. This fringe was a new venture. He stroked it much of the time, and stole glances at it in mirrors. He could twist it up a little at the ends.

The rest of him indicated a taste that was hardly bent on the inexpensive as such. His duck trousers (this was the middle nineties) were smartly creased and rustled with starch. His white canvas shoes were not ‘sneakers’ but had heavy soles and half-heels of red rubber. His coat, lying now across the iron tube that marked the foot of the bed, was a double-breasted blue serge, unlined, well-tailored. The hat, hung on a mirror post above the ‘golden oak’ bureau, was of creamy white felt. He had given up spectacles for nose glasses with a black silk cord.

Nearly two years earlier his mother had died. He had lived on, caught in a drift of time and circumstance, keeping, without any particular plan, this little room with its sloping ceiling. The price was an item, of course – six dollars a week for room and board. You couldn’t do better in Sunbury, even then. Memories haunted the place, naturally enough. Loneliness had dwelt close with him.

His mother’s picture, in a silver frame, stood at the right of the pincushion; at the left, in hammered brass (‘repoussé work’) was a ‘cabinet size’ photograph of Martha Caldwell. A woven-wire rack on the wall held half a hundred snapshots of girls, boys, and groups, in about a third of which figured Martha’s smiling, sensible, pleasantly freckled face. A guitar in an old green bag leaned against the wall behind his mother’s old trunk; it had not been out of the bag in more than a year. An assortment of neck-ties hung over the gas-jet by the bureau. Tacked about on the wall were six or eight copies of Gibson girls; rather good copies, barringva certain stiffness of line. On the seat in the one dormer window reposed two cushions, one covered with college pennants, the other with cigar bands laboriously cross-stitched together; both from, the hands of Martha.

Henry’s little bookcase was not uninteresting. It contained the following books: Daily Strength for Daily Needs, Browning, Trollope, and Hawthorne in sets, Sonnets, from the Portuguese, Words often Mispronounced, Longfellow, complete in one fat volume. Red Line Edition, and Six Thousand Puzzles, all of which had been his mother’s; Green’s History of the English People, Boswell’s Johnson, both largely uncut, and the Discourses of Epictetus, which three had come as Christmas or birthday gifts; and exactly one volume, a work by an obscure author (who was pictured in the frontispiece with a bristling moustache and intensely knit brows) entitled Will Power and Self Mastery, which offered the only clue as to Henry’s own taste in book buying.

His taste in reading was another matter. The novels and romances he had devoured during certain periods of his teens had mostly come from the Sunbury Free Public Library. Lately, however, apart from thrilling moments with The Prisoner of Zenda, Under the Red Rose, and The Princess Aline, he had found difficulty in reading at all. Something was stirring within him, something restlessly positive, an impulse to give out rather than take in. Though he had, at intervals, lunged with determination at the Green and the Boswell. This effort, indeed, had been repeated so many times that he occasionally caught himself speaking of these authors as if he had read them exhaustively.

The bottom drawer of the bureau was a third full of unfinished manuscripts – attempts at novels, short stories, poems, plays – each faithfully reflecting its immediate source of inspiration. There were paragraphs that might have been written by a little Dickens; there were thinly diluted specimens of Dumas, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Richard Harding Davis, Thackeray. The rest was all Kipling, prose and verse. Everybody was writing Kipling then.

A step sounded in the hall. The knob turned softly; the door opened a little way; and the thinnish, moderately pretty face of Mamie Wilcox appeared – pale blue eyes with the beginnings of hollows beneath them, fair skin, straight hay-coloured hair, wisps of it straying down across forehead and cheek, thin nose, soft but rather sulky mouth. She was probably twenty-two or twenty-three at this time.

All she said was, ‘Oh!’ – very low.

‘Wonder you wouldn’t knock!’ said he.

‘Wonder you wouldn’t get up before noon!’ she responded smartly, but still in that cautious voice; then added, ‘Here, I’ll leave the towels, and come back.’ And she slipped into the room, a heavier and more shapely figure of a girl than was suggested by the face, a girl in a full-length gingham apron and little shoes with unexpectedly high heels; not ‘French’ heels, but the sloping style known then as ‘military.’

2

Henry’s colour was rising a little. He cleared his throat, and said, mumbling, ‘Leave anything you like.’

‘I’ll do just that,’ – she turned, with a flirt of her apron and stood, between washstand and door, surveying him – ‘what I like, and nothing more.’… Her eyes wandered now from him to the picture at the left of the pincushion, then to the snapshots on the wall, and she smiled, very self-contained, very knowing, with the expression that the young call ‘sarcastic.’ The adjective came to mind. Henry’s colour was mounting higher.

‘Pretty snappy to-day, ain’t we?’ said he.

‘Yes, when we’re snapped at,’ said she.

There was a silence that ran on into seconds and tens of seconds.

Then, acting on an impulse of astonishing suddenness, he sprang toward her.

With almost equal agility she stepped away. But he caught one hand.

She had the door-knob in her other hand. She drew the door open, then, indecisively, pushed it nearly to.

‘Be careful!’ she whispered. ‘They’ll hear!’

She made a small effort to free her hand. For a moment they stood tugging at each other.

When Henry spoke, in an effort to appear the off-hand man of the world he assuredly was not, his voice sounded weak and husky.

‘Whew – strong!’

‘Suppose I slapped.’

‘Slap all you like.’

‘What would Martha Caldwell say?’

There was a gloomy sort of anger on Henry’s red face. He jerked her violently toward him.

‘Stop! You’re hurting my wrist!’ With which she yielded a little. He found himself about to take her in his arms. He heard her whispering – ‘For Heaven’s sake be careful! They’ll surely hear!’

He was most unhappy. He pushed her roughly away, and rushed to the window.,

He knew from the silence that she was lingering. He hated her. And himself.

She said: ‘Well, you needn’t get mad.’

Then, slowly, cautiously, she let herself out. He heard her moving composedly along the hall.

He felt weak. And deeply guilty. For a long time this moment had been a possibility; now it had taken place. What if some one had seen her come in! What if she should come again! What if she should tell!..

He found one hair brush on the floor, the other on the bed, and brushed his hair; donned his coat, buttoning it and smoothing it down about his shapely torso with a momentary touch of complacency; glanced at the mirror; twisted up his moustache; then stood waiting for his colour to go down.

Suddenly, with one of his quick impulses, he sprang at the bookcase, drew out the Epictetus– it was a little book, bound in ‘ooze’ calf of an olive-green colour – and read these words (the book opened there): —

‘To the rational animal only is the irrational intolerable.

He lowered the book and repeated the phrase aloud.

3

A little later – red about the ears, and given to sudden starts when the swinging pantry doors opened to let a student waiter in or out – he sat, quite erect, in the dining room and bolted a boarding-house breakfast of stewed prunes, oatmeal, fried steak, fried potatoes, fried mush swimming in brown sugar syrup, and coffee. The Discourses of Epictetus lay at his elbow.

After this he walked – stiffly self-conscious, book under arm – over to Simpson Street, and took a chair and an Inter Ocean at Schultz and Schwartz’s, among the line of those waiting to be shaved.

This accomplished he paused outside, on the curb, to pencil this entry in a red pocket account-book: —

‘Shave – 10 c.’

He wavered when passing Donovan’s; stepped in and consumed a frosted maple shake. Which necessitated the further entry in the red book: —

‘Soda – 10 c.’

In front of Berger’s grocery he met Martha Caldwell. They walked together to the corner.

Martha was a sizable girl, about as tall as Henry, with large blue eyes, an attractively short nose, abundant brown hair coiled away under her flat straw hat, and a general air of good sense. Martha was really a goodlooking young woman, and would have been popular had not Henry stood in her light. She had a small gift at drawing (the Gibson copies in Henry’s room were hers) and danced gracefully enough. Monday and Thursday evenings were his regular calling times; and there were so many other evenings when he was expected to take her to this house or that with ‘the crowd’ that the other local ‘men’ had long since given up calling at her house. But they were not engaged.

On this occasion there was constraint between them. They spoke of the lovely weather. She, knowing Henry pretty well, looked with some curiosity at his book. Henry glanced sidelong at her across a wide bottomless gulf, and stroked his moustache. He was groping desperately for words. He began to resent her. He presented an outer front of stem self-control.

At the corner they stopped and stood in a silence that grew rapidly embarrassing.

She lowered her eyes and dug with the point of her parasol in the turf by the stone walk.

He thrust both hands into his trousers’ pockets, spread his feet, and stared across at the long veranda of the Sunbury House. It seemed to him that he had never been so unhappy.

‘Are you’ – Martha began; hesitated; went on – ‘were you thinking of coming around this evening?’

‘Why – it’s Thursday, ain’t it?’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it’s Thursday.’

‘Listen, Martha!’ Was it possible that she suspected something? But how could she! His ears were getting red again. He knew it. She must never, never know about Mamie!.. ‘Listen, I may have to go down to Mrs Arthur V. Henderson’s.’

‘Oh,’ she murmured, ‘that musicale.’

‘Yes.’ Eagerness was creeping into his voice. ‘Anne Mayer Stelton. She’s been over studying with Marchesi, you know. Mrs Henderson asked specially to have me cover it.’

‘Why don’t you go?’

‘Well – you see how it is. Of course, I’d hate – ’

‘You’d better go.’ Saying which Martha turned away down Filbert Avenue, and left him standing there.

He bit his lip; pulled at his moustache. ‘I ought to do something for her,’ he thought. ‘Buy some flowers – or a box of Devoe’s.’

This was an idle thought; for the day, Thursday, lay much too close to the financially lean end of the week to permit of flowers or candy. And he hadn’t asked anywhere for a dollar of credit these nearly two years. Still, he felt faintly the warmth of his kindly intention.

It didn’t seem altogether right to let her go like that. They had not before drifted so near a quarrel. On the farther side of the street he paused, and glanced down the avenue.

A smart trap that he had never seen before had pulled up, midway of the block. An impeccable coachman sat stiffly upon an indubitable box. A man who appeared to have reddish hair, dressed in a brown cutaway suit and Derby hat, a man with a pronounced if close-cropped red moustache and a suggestively interesting band of mourning about his left sleeve, was leaning out, gracefully, graciously, talking to – Martha. And Martha was listening.

Henry moved on, little confused pangs of quite unreasonable jealousy stabbing at his heart, and entered the business-and-editorial office of The Weekly Voice of Sunbury, where he worked.

Here he laid down the Discourses of Epictetus and asked Humphrey Weaver, untitled editor of the paper (old man Boice, the owner, would never permit any one but himself to be known by that title), for the galley proofs of the week’s ‘Personal Mention.’

He found this item: —

Mr James B. Merchant, Jr., of Greggs, Merchant & Co., was a guest of Mr and Mrs Ames at the Country Club on Saturday evening. Mr Merchant has leased for the summer the apartment of M. B. Wills, on Lower Filbert Avenue.

That was the man! James B. Merchant was a bachelor, rich, a famous cotillion leader on the South Side, Chicago, an only son of the original James B. Merchant.

And Martha had gone to the Country Club Saturday with the Ameses. This curious tension between himself and Martha had then first bordered on the acute. Mr Ames disapproved of Henry; he felt that Martha shouldn’t have gone. And now, of course, her lack of consideration for himself was leading her into new complications.

He sat moodily fingering the papers on the littered, ink-stained table that served him for a desk. He was disturbed, uncomfortable, but couldn’t settle on what seemed a proper mental attitude. He was jealous; but he mustn’t let his jealousy carry him to the point of taking a definite stand with Martha, because – well…

Life seemed very difficult.

4

The Voice office occupied what had once been a shop, opposite the hotel. The show window of plate glass now displayed the splintery rear panels of old Mr Boice’s rolltop desk, that was heaped, on top, with back numbers of the Voice, the Inter Ocean and the Congressional Record, and a pile of inky zinc etchings mounted on wood blocks.

Within, back of a railing, were Humphrey Weaver’s desk and Henry Calverly’s table.

Humphrey was tall, rather thin and angular, with a long face, long nose, long chin, swarthy complexion, and quick, quizzical brown eyes with innumerable fine wrinkles about them. When he smiled, his whole face seemed to wrinkle back, displaying many large teeth in a cavernous mouth.

Humphrey might have been twenty-five or six. He was a reticent young man, with no girl or women friends that one ever saw, a fondness for the old corn-cob that he was always scraping, filling, or smoking, and a secret passion for the lesser known laws of physics. He lived alone, in a barn back of the old Parmenter place. He had divided the upper story into living and sleeping rooms, and put in hardwood floors and simple furniture and a piano. Downstairs, in what he called his shop, were lathes, a workbench, innumerable wood-and-metal working tools, a dozen or more of heavy metal wheels set, at right angles, in circular frames, and several odd little round machines suspended from the ceiling at the ends of twisted cords. In one corner stood a number of box kites, very large ones. And there were large planes of silk on spruce frames. He was an alumnus of the local university, but had made few friends, and had never been known in the town. Henry hadn’t heard of him before the previous year, when he had taken the desk in the Voice office.

‘Say, Hen,’ – Henry looked up from his copy paper – ; ‘Mrs Henderson looked in a few minutes ago, and left a programme and a list of guests for her show to-night. She wants to be sure and have you there. You can do it, can’t you?’

Henry nodded listlessly.

‘It seems there’s to be a contralto, too – somebody that’s visiting her. She – Sister Henderson – appears to take you rather seriously, my boy. Wants you particularly to hear the new girl. One Corinne Doag. We,’ – Humphrey smoked meditatively, then finished his sentence – ‘we talked you over, the lady and I. I promised you’d come.’

At noon, the editorial staff of two lunched at Stanley’s.

‘Wha’d you and Mrs Henderson say about me?’ asked Henry, over the pie.

‘She says,’ remarked Humphrey, the wrinkles multiplying about his eyes, ‘that you have temperament. She thinks it’s a shame.’

‘What’s a shame?’ muttered Henry.

‘Whatever has happened to you. I told her you were the steadiest boy I ever knew. Don’t drink, smoke, or flirt. I didn’t add that you enter every cent you spend in that little red book; but I’ve seen you doing it and been impressed. But I mentioned that you’re the most conscientious reporter I ever saw. That started her. It seems that you’re nothing of the sort. My boy, she set you before me in a new light. You begin to appear complex and interesting.’

Still muttering, Henry said, ‘Nothing so very interesting about me.’

‘It seems that you put on an opera here – directed it, or sang it, or something. Before my time.’

‘That was Iolanthe,’ said Henry, with a momentarily complacent memory.

‘And you sang – all over the place, apparently. Why don’t you sing now?’

‘It’s too,’ – Henry was mumbling, flushing, and groping for a word – ‘too physical.’

Then, with a sudden movement that gave Humphrey a little start, the boy leaned over the table, pulled at his moustache, and asked, gloomily: ‘Listen! Do you think a man can change his nature?’

Humphrey considered this without a smile. ‘I don’t see exactly how, Hen.’