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

3

The sound that caused Humphrey to start up in surprise was the first outbreak of profanity he had ever heard from the lips of Henry Calverly.

Henry was sitting up stiffly, holding last week’s Voice with hands that distinctly trembled. When Humphrey first looked, he was white, but after a moment the colour began flowing back to his face and continued flowing until his face was red. His lips were clamped tight, as if the small verbal explosion that had just passed them had proved even more startling to himself than to Humphrey. ‘What is it?’ asked the editor.

Henry stared at the outspread paper.

‘This!’ he got out. ‘This – this!’

‘What’s the matter, Hen?’

‘Don’t you know?’

‘Oh, your picnic story! Yes – but – what on earth is the matter with you?’

‘You know, Hump! You never told me!’

‘You mean the cuts?’

‘Oh – yes!’ This ‘Oh’ was a moan of anguish.

‘Good heavens, Hen – you didn’t for a minute think we could print it as you wrote it?’ Henry’s facial muscles moved, but he got no words out. Humphrey, touched, went on. ‘I don’t mind telling you – between ourselves – that the thing as you wrote it, every word, is the best bit of descriptive writing I’ve seen this year. But you wrote the real story, boy. You painted the whole Simpson Street bunch as they are – every wart. It’s a savage picture. Why, we’d have dropped seventy per cent, of our advertising between Saturday and Monday! And the queer little picture of Charlie Waterhouse out behind the lemonade stand – Why, boy, that’s enough to bust open the town!

With Bob McGibbon gunning for Charlie and demanding an accounting of the town money! Gee!’

Henry seemed hardly to hear this.

‘Who – who re-wrote it?’

‘I did some. The old man polished it off himself.’

‘It’s ruined!’

‘Of course. But it brought you a raise to twelve a week. That’s something.’

‘You don’t understand. It was my work. And it was true. I wrote the truth.’

‘That’s why.’

‘Then they don’t want the truth?’

‘Good lord – no!’

Henry considered this, bent over as if to read further, twisted his flushed face as if in pain, then abruptly sprang up.

‘What’s become of it – the piece I wrote?’

‘Well, Hen – I didn’t feel that we had a right to destroy the thing. Too dam good! In a sense, it’s the old man’s property; in another sense, it’s yours – ’

‘It’s mine!’

‘In a sense. At any rate, I took it on myself to have a copy made confidentially. Then I turned the original over to Mr Boice. He doesn’t know.’

‘Where’s the copy?’

‘Here in my desk.’

‘Give it to me!’

‘Just hold your horses a minute, Hen – ’

‘You give it – ’

Humphrey threw up a hand, then opened a drawer. He handed over the typewritten manuscript.

‘Who made this?’

‘Gertie Wombast. I warned her to keep her mouth shut.’

‘How much did it cost?’

‘Oh, see here, Hen – I won’t talk to you! Not till you get over this excitement.’

‘I’m not excited. Or, at least – ’

Humphrey gave a shrug. Henry, gripping the roll of manuscript, started out.

‘Wait a minute, Hen! What do you think you’re going to do?’

‘What do you s’pose? Only one thing I can do!’

‘Going after the old man?’

‘Of course! You would yourself, if – ’

‘No, I wouldn’t. Not in any such rush as that. It’s upsetting to have your good work pawed over and cut to pieces, but twelve a week is – ’

‘Oh, Hump, it’s everything! He’s made it impossible for me. I could stand some of it, but not all this. He ain’t fair! He wants to make it hard for me! He’s just thinking up ways to be mean. And he’s spoiled my work – best thing I’ve ever done in my life! And now people will never know how well I can write.’

‘Oh, yes, they will!’

‘No, they won’t. I’ll never feel just that way again. It’s a feeling that comes. And then it goes. You can’t do anything about it. It was Corinne and the way I felt about her. And a lot o’ things. Seemed to make me different. Lifted me up. I was red-hot.’ He reached out and struck the paper from the table to the floor. ‘You bet I’ll go to old Boice! ‘I’ll tell him a thing or two I He’ll know something’s happened before he gets through with me. I’ve had something to say to him for a good while. Going to say it now. Guess he don’t know I’ll be twenty-one in November. Have a little money then. He can’t put it over me. I’ll buy his old paper. Or start another one. I’ll make the town too hot for him. Thinks he owns all Sunbury. But he don’t!’

‘Hen,’ said Humphrey bravely, when the irate youth paused for breath, ‘you simply must not try to talk to him while you’re mad as this.’

‘But don’t you see, Hump,’ cried Henry, his face working with vexation, tears close to his eyes; ‘it’s just the time! When I’m mad. If I wait, I’ll never say a word.’

He rolled the manuscript tightly in his hand, bit his lip, then abruptly rushed out.

‘Look here,’ cried Humphrey. ‘Don’t you go showing that – ’

But the only reply was the noisy slam of the screen door.

Face set, eyes wild behind their glasses, Henry hurried down Simpson Street toward the post-office.

Miss Hemple, at the money-order window, said that Mr Boice was having a talk with Mr Waterhouse in the back office and wasn’t to be disturbed.

Henry turned away. For a little time he studied the weather-chart hanging on the wall. He went to the wide front window and gazed out on the street. His determination was already oozing away. He found himself slouching and straightened up. Repeatedly he had to do this. Four times he went back to the money-order window; four times Miss Hemple smiled and shook her head.

Martha Caldwell walked by with the two Smith girls. He thought she saw him. If so, she carefully avoided a direct glance. They still weren’t speaking. At least, Martha wasn’t. And to think that during three long years, except for another episode now and than, she had been his girl!

Heigh-ho! No more girls! He was through!

The Ames’s carriage rolled fly. Mary Ames was in it. And – apparently, unmistakably – the new girl. The girl of the Sunbury House veranda. She was chatting brightly. She was pretty.

He turned mournfully away. She was not for him. Once it might have been possible – back in his gay big days. But not now. Not now.

He approached the window for the sixth time. For the sixth time, Miss Hemple shook her head.

He wandered out to the door.

His chance had passed. If the old man should, at this moment, and alone, come walking out, he would say meekly, ‘Good-afternoon, Mr Boice,’ and hurry away. He would even try to look busy and earnest. There was shame in the thought. His mouth was drooping at the corners. All of him – body, mind, spirit – was sagging now. He moved, slowly down toward the tracks, entered the little lunch-counter place there and ate a thick piece of lemon-meringue pie. Which was further weakness. He knew it. It completed his depression.

He felt that he must think. He ordered another piece of pie. He wished he hadn’t said so much to Humphrey. Would he ever learn to control the spoken word? Probably not. He sighed. And ate. He couldn’t very well go back to the office. Not like this – in defeat. All that work, too I Life, work, friendship, all the realities seemed to be slipping from his grasp. His thoughts were drifting off into a haze. It was an old familiar mood. It had come often during his teens. Not so much lately; but he was as helpless before it as he had been at eighteen, when he finally drifted aimlessly out of his class at the high school.

In those days, it had been his habit to wander along the beach, sit on a breakwater, let life and love and duty drift by beyond his reach. Thither he headed now by a back street. Too many people he knew along Simpson Street. Besides, he might be thrown face to face with the old man.

At the corner of Filbert Avenue he met the editor and proprietor of the Gleaner. He inclined his head with unconscious severity and would have passed on.

But Robert A. McGibbon came to a halt, smiled in a thin strained fashion, and glanced curiously from Henry’s face to the tightly rolled manuscript in his hand and back to the face.

‘Well,’ he remarked, ‘how’s things?’

Henry wanted to be let alone. But he had never deliberately snubbed anybody in his life. He couldn’t. So he, too, came to a stop.

‘Oh, pretty good,’ he replied.

4

He found himself, in his turn, looking Mr McGibbon over. The man was just a little seedy. He had a hand up, rubbing the back of his head under the tipped-down straw hat, and Henry noted the shiny black surface of his sleeve. He had a freckled, thinly alert face, a little pinched. His hair was straight and came down raggedly about ears and collar. Behind his gold-rimmed spectacles, small, sharp eyes, very keen, appeared to be darting this way and that, restlessly noting everything within their range of vision.

‘Things going well over at the Voice office?’ Henry was silent. He couldn’t lie. ‘Not going so well, eh? That’s too bad. Anything special up?’

‘No,’ said Henry, finding his voice untrustworthy; ‘nothing special.’

‘What you doing now? Anything much?’ Henry shook his head. ‘Taking a little walk, perhaps.’

‘Why – yes.’

‘Mind if I walk along with you?’

‘Why – no.’

They fell into step.

‘Been thinking a little about you lately. Wondering if you were happy in your work over there.’ Henry compressed his lips. ‘Did you write the Business Men’s Picnic story?’ Henry was silent. ‘Pretty fair job, I thought.’

‘It was terrible!’

‘Oh, no – not terrible. You’re too hard on yourself.’

‘I’m not hard on myself. It’s his fault. He spoiled it.’

‘Who – Boice? I shouldn’t wonder. He could spoil The New York Sun in two days, with just a little rope.’

‘He tore it all to pieces. I’ve got the real story here. I couldn’t let you see it, of course.’

McGibbon glanced down at the roll of paper.

‘You like to write, don’t you?’ Henry nodded shortly. ‘Boice won’t let you do it, I suppose.’ Henry shook his head. ‘He wouldn’t. You know, there isn’t really any reason why a country paper shouldn’t be interesting. Play to the subscriber, you know. Boice plays to the advertiser and the county printing. Other way takes longer, takes a little more money at first, but once you get your subscriber hooked, the advertiser has to follow. Better for the long game.’

Henry was only half listening. They were crossing the Lake Shore Drive now. They stopped at the railing and looked out over the lake. Henry’s thoughts were darting this way and that, searching instinctively for a weak spot in the wall of fate that had closed in on him.

‘I’ve got a little money,’ he said.

McGibbon smiled.

‘Well, it has its uses.’

‘I haven’t quite got it. I get the interest. And they’ll have to give me all of it in November. The seventh. I’ll be twenty-one then.’ These words seemed to reassure. Henry. ‘Yes; I’ll be twenty-one. It’s quite a little, too. Over four thousand dollars. It was my mother’s.’

‘It’s not to be sneezed at,’ said McGibbon reflectively. ‘If I had four thousand right now – or one thousand, for that matter – I could make sure of turning my corner and landing the old Gleaner on Easy Street. I’ve had a fight with that paper. Been through a few things these eight months. But I’m gaining circulation in chunks now. Six months more, and I’ll nail that gang.’

‘You know’ – McGibbon threw a knee up on the railing and lighted a cigar – ‘it takes money to make money.’

‘Oh, yes – of course,’ said Henry.

‘A thousand dollars now on the Gleaner would be worth ten thousand ten years from now.’ He smoked thoughtfully. ‘I’ve been watching you, Calverly. And if it wasn’t so tough on you, I could laugh at old Boice. He’s got a jewel in you, and he doesn’t know it. I suppose he keeps you grinding – correcting proof, running around – ’

‘Oh, you’ve no idea!’ Henry burst out. ‘Everything! Just an awful grind! And now he expects me to cover all the “Society” and “Church Doings.”’

‘What! How’s that? Has he come down on Miss Dittenhoefer?’

Henry swallowed convulsively and nodded.

‘He’s piling it all on me, and I won’t stand for it. It ain’t right! It ‘ain’t fair! And you bet your life he’s going to hear a few things from me before this day’s much older! I’m going to tell him a thing or two!’

‘That’s right!’ said McGibbon. ‘He won’t respect you any the less for it.’

A silence followed. Henry stood, flushed, breathing hard through set teeth, staring out at the horizon.

‘I’m going to tell you something, Calverly. And it’s because I feel that you and I are going to be friends. I’ve known about you, of course. I know you can write. You’d do a lot to make a paper readable. Which is what a paper has got to be. But now I can see that we’re going to be friends. You’ve confided in me. I’m going to confide in you.’ He paused, blew out a long, meditative arrow of smoke, then added, ‘I know a little about that story you wrote.’

‘You do!’ McGibbon slowly nodded. ‘But how?’

‘You must remember, Calverly, that I’m not like these small-town folks around here. I’ve worked at this game in New York, and I know a thing or two.’

‘I’ve been in New York,’ said Henry.

‘Great town! But I don’t spend my time here in daydreams. I have my lines out all over town. There’s mighty little going on that I don’t know.’

‘You seem to know a lot about Charlie Waterhouse.’

McGibbon smiled like a sphinx, then said: —

‘I’ve nearly got him. Not quite, but nearly.’

‘But I don’t see how you could know about – ’

‘I told you I was going to confide in you. It’s simple enough. Gert Wombast let her sister read it – the one that works at the library. Swore her to secrecy. And – well, I board at the Wombasts’ – Look here, Calverly: you’d better let me read it.’

Henry promptly surrendered it.

McGibbon laid the manuscript on his knee, lighted a fresh cigar, and gazed at the lake. Henry, all nerves, was clasping and unclasping his hands.

‘Of course,’ he said, ‘this ain’t really a finished thing, you understand. It’s just as I wrote it off – fast, you know – and I haven’t had a chance to correct it or – ’

McGibbon raised his hand.

‘No, Calverly – none of that. This is literature. Of course, old Boice couldn’t print it. Never in the world. But it’s sweet stuff. It’s a perfect, merciless pen-picture of life on Simpson Street. And those two old crooks behind the lemonade stand – you’ve opened a jack-pot there. If you only knew it, son, that’s evidence. Evidence! You walked right into it. Charlie Waterhouse is short in his town accounts. I know that. Boice and Weston are covering up for him. They work up this neat little purse and give it to Charlie. Why? Because he’s the most popular man in Sunbury? Rot! Because they’re helping him pay back. Making the town help.’

‘Oh, do you really think – ’

‘“Think?” I know. This completes the picture. Tell me – what is Boice paying you?’

‘Twelve a week, now.’

‘Hm! That’s quite a little for a country weekly. I could meet it, though, if – see here: What chance is there of your getting, say, a thousand of your money free and investing in the Gleaner? Now, wait! I want to put this thing before you. It’s the turning-point. If we act without delay, we’ve got ‘em. We’ve got everything. We own the town. Here we are! The Gleaner is just at the edge of success. I take you over from the Voice at the same salary – twelve a week. I’ll give you lots of rope. I won’t expect routine from you. I’ll expect genius. Stuff like this. The real thing. Just when it comes to you, and you feel you can’t help writing. With this new evidence I can go after Charlie Waterhouse and break him. I’ll finish Boice and Weston at the same time. Show up the whole outfit! Whatever’ll be left of the Voice by that time, Boice can have and welcome. The Gleaner will be the only paper in Sunbury.’

‘My Uncle Arthur is executor of my mother’s estate.’

‘You go right after him. No time to lose. We must drive this right through.’

‘I’ll see him to-morrow.’

‘Couldn’t you find him to-night?’

5

Uncle Arthur lived in Chicago, out on the West Side. It was a long ride – first by suburban train into the city, then by cable-car through miles upon miles of gray wooden tenements and dingy gray-brick tenements. You breathed in odours of refuse and smoke and coal-gas all the way.

Uncle Arthur was as thin as McGibbon, but wholly without the little gleam in the eyes that advertised the proprietor of the Gleaner as an eager and perhaps dangerous man. Uncle Arthur was a man of method who had worked through long years into a methodical but fairly substantial prosperity.

His thin nose was long, and prominent. His brow was deeply furrowed. His gaze was critical. He believed firmly that life is a disciplinary training for some more important period of existence after death. He didn’t smoke or drink. Nor would he keep in his employ those who indulged in such practices. He was an officer of several organisations aiming at civic and social reform.

Uncle Arthur laid a pedantic stress, in all business matters, on what he called ‘putting the thing right end to.’ It was not unnatural, therefore, that he should receive a distinctly unfavourable impression when Henry began, with a foolish little gesture and a great deal of fumbling at his moustache, slouching in his chair, by saying ‘There’s a little chance come up – oh, nothing much, of course – for me to make a little money, sort of on the side – and you see I’ll be twenty-one in November; so it’s just a matter of three or four months, anyway – and I was figuring – oh, just talking the thing over – ’

His voice trailed off into a mumble.

‘If you would take your hand away from your mouth, Henry,’ said his uncle sharply, ‘perhaps I could make out what you’re trying to say.’

Henry sat up with a jerk.

‘Why, you see, Uncle Arthur, there’s a fellow bought the old Sunbury Gleaner and he’s awfully smart – got his training in New York – and he’s brought the paper already – why, it ain’t eight months! – to where he’s right on the point of turning his corner. You see, a thousand dollars now may easily be worth ten thousand in a few years. The Voice is a rotten paper. Nobody reads the darned thing. And I can’t work for old Boice, anyhow. He drives me crazy. If he’d just give me half a chance to do the kind of thing I can do best once in a while; but this – ’

‘Henry, are you asking me to advance you a thousand dollars of your principal?’

‘Why – well, yes, if – ’

‘Most certainly not!’

‘But, you see, it’s so close to November seventh, anyway, that I thought – ’

‘You thought that on your twenty-first birthday I would at once close out the investments I have made with the money your mother left and hand you the principal in cash?’

Henry stared at him, his thoughts for the moment frozen stiff. In Uncle Arthur’s obstructionist attitude, so suddenly revealed, lay the promise of a new, wholly undreamed-of disappointment. It was crushing. Then, almost in the same second, it was stimulating. Henry’s eyes blazed.

‘You mean to say – ’ he began, shouting.

‘I mean to say that I haven’t the slightest intention of letting you squander the money your mother so painfully – ’

‘That’s my money!’

‘But I’m your uncle and your guardian – ’

‘You needn’t think you’re going to keep that one minute after November seventh!’

‘I will use my judgment. I won’t be dictated to by a boy who – ’

‘But you gotta!’

‘I have not got to!’

‘I won’t stand for – ’

‘Henry, I won’t have such talk here. I think you had better go.’

Henry, with a good deal of mumbling, went. He was bewildered. And the little storm of indignant anger had shaken him. He returned, during the ride back past the tenements on the jerky cable-car, through streets that swarmed with noisy, ragged children and frowsy adults and all the smells, to depression. McGibbon said that Uncle Arthur’s threat to hold the money after the seventh of November was a distinct point.

‘In these matters, unfortunately, where a relative or family friend has for years had charge of money belonging to others, little temptations are bound to come up. Now, your uncle may be the most scrupulously honest of men, but – ’

‘He has a bad eye,’ Henry put in.

‘I don’t doubt it. Calverly, let me tell you – never forget this – a man who hesitates for one instant to account freely, fully for money is never to be trusted.’

‘But what can I do?’

‘Do? Everything! Just what I’m doing with Charlie Waterhouse, for one thing – insist on a full statement.’

‘They framed a letter – or McGibbon framed it – demanding an accounting, ‘in order that further legal measures may not become necessary.’ McGibbon said he would send it early in the morning, registered, and with a special-delivery stamp. ‘Later, they decided to add emphasis by means of a telegram demanding immediate consideration of the letter.

Late that night, when Humphrey came upstairs into a pitch-dark living-room and switched on the light, he discovered a pale youth sitting stiffly on a window-seat wide-awake, eyes staring nervously, hands clasped.

‘Well, what on earth?’ said he, in mild surprise.

‘Oh, Hump, I’ve wondered what you’d think – leaving you in the lurch with all that work!

Humphrey threw out a lean hand.

‘I can manage. Get some help from one of the students. And Gertie Wombast is usually available – Oh, say; how about the old man? Did you tell him what’s what?’

Henry’s burning eyes stared out of that white face. Suddenly – so suddenly that Humphrey himself started – he sprang up, cried out; ‘No! No! No!’ and rushed into his bedroom, slamming the door after him.

Humphrey looked soberly at the door, shook his head, filled his pipe.

That ‘No! No! No!’ still rang in his ears It was a cry of pain.

Humphrey had suffered; but he had never known a turbulence of the sort that every now and then seemed to tear Henry to pieces.

‘Must be fierce,’ he thought. ‘But it works up as well as down. Runs to extremes. Creative faculty, I suppose. Well, he’s got it – that’s all. And he’s only a kid. Thing to do’s to stand by and try to steady him up a little when he comes out of it.’

And the philosophical Humphrey went to bed.

6

At noon, no word had come from Uncle Arthur. Henry, all the morning, had flitted back and forth between McGibbon’s rear office and the telegraph office in the ‘depot.’

At twelve-thirty, they sent a peremptory message, demanding a reply by three o’clock. An ultimatum.

The reply came unexpectedly, with startling effect, at twenty-five minutes past two, requesting Henry to come directly into his uncle’s Chicago office.

He caught the two-forty-seven. McGibbon, who had missed nothing of the concern on Henry’s face at this brisk counter-offensive on the part of Uncle Arthur, was with him.