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

7

Humphrey found him, a little before one, at the rooms, and thought he looked ill. He was sitting on the edge of his bed, staring at a small newspaper clipping. He looked up, through his doorway, saw his friend standing in the living-room, mumbled a colourless greeting, and let his heavy eyes fall again.

‘What’s all this?’ asked Humphrey, with a rather weary, wrinkly smile.

Henry got up then and came slowly into the living-room.

‘It’s this,’ he explained, in a voice that was husky and light, without its usual body. ‘This thing. I’ve had it quite a while.’

Humphrey read: —

Positively No Commission HEIRS CAN BORROW On or sell their individual estate, income or future inheritance; lowest rates; strictly confidential Heirs’ Loan Office.

And an address.

‘What on earth are you doing with this, Hen?’

‘Well, Hump, there’s still a little more’n three thousand dollars in my legacy. I got a thousand this summer, you know, and lent it to McGibbon for my interest in the paper. But my uncle said he wouldn’t give me a cent more until I’m twenty-one, in November. And so I was wondering… Look here! How much do you suppose I could get out of it from these people. They’re all right, you see?

They’ve got a regular office and – ’

‘You’d just about get out with your underwear and shoes, Hen. They might leave you a necktie. What do you want it for – throw it in after the thousand?’

‘Well, McGibbon’s broke – ’

‘Yes, I know. They’re saying on the street that Boice has got the Gleaner already. Two compositors and your foreman were in our place half an hour ago asking for work. Boice went right down there. I saw him start climbing the stairs.’

‘That’s his second trip this morning, then, Hump. He offered Bob five hundred.’

‘But it ought to be worth a few thousand.’

‘Sure. And except for there not being any money it’s going great. You’d be surprised! You know it’s often that way. Bob says many a promising business has gone under just because they didn’t have the money to tide it over a tight place. But he’s getting the circulation. You’ve no idea! And when you get that you’re bound to get the advertisers. Sooner or later. Bob says they just have to fall in line.’

Humphrey appeared to be only half listening to this eager little torrent of words. He deliberately filled his pipe; then moved over to a window and gazed soberly out at the back yard of the parsonage.

Henry, moody again, was staring at the advertisement, fairly hypnotising himself with it.

‘Great to think of the Old Man having to climb those stairs twice,’ Humphrey remarked, without turning. Then: ‘Even with all the trouble you’re going through, Hen, you’re lucky not to be working for Boice. He does wear on one.’

He smoked the pipe out. Then, brow’s knit, his long swarthy face wrinkled deeply with thought, he walked slowly over to the door of his own bedroom and leaned there, studying the interior.

‘There’s three thousand dollars’ worth of books in here,’ he remarked. ‘Or close to it. Even at second hand they’d fetch something. You see, it’s really a well built, pretty complete little scientific library. Now come downstairs.’

He had to say it again: ‘Come on downstairs.’

Henry followed, then; hardly aware of the oddity of Humphrey’s actions.

In the half-light that sifted dustily in through the high windows, the metal lathes, large and small, the tool benches, the two large reels of piano wire, the rows of wall boxes filled with machine jars, the round objects that might have been electric motors hanging by twisted strings or wires from the ceiling joists, the heavy steel wheels of various sizes mounted in frames, some with wooden handles at one side, the big box kites and the wood-and-silk planes stacked at one end of the room, the gas engine mounted at the other end, the water motor in a corner, the wheels, shafts and belting overhead – all were indistinct, ghostly. And all were covered with dust.

‘See!’ Humphrey waved his pipe. ‘I’ve done no work here for six weeks. And I shan’t do any for a good while. I can’t. It takes leisure – long-evenings – Sundays when you aren’t disturbed by a soul. And at that it means years and years, working as I’ve had to. You know, getting out the Voice every week. You know how it’s been with me, Hen. People are going to fly some day, Hen. As sure as we’re walking now. Pretty soon. Chanute – Langley – they know! Those are Chanute gliders over there. By the kites. I’ve never told you; I’ve worked with ‘em, moonlight nights, from the sand-dunes away up the beach. I’ve got some locked in an old boat-house up there, Hen’ – he stood, very tall, a reminiscent, almost eager light in eyes that had been dull of late, a gaunt strong hand resting affectionately on a gyroscope – ‘I’ve flown over six hundred feet! Myself! Gliding, of course. Got an awful ducking, but I did it.

‘But it takes money, Hen. I’ve thought I could be an inventor and do my job besides. Maybe I could. Maybe some day I’ll succeed at it. But I’ve just come to see what it needs. Material, workmen, time – Hen, you’ve got to have a real shop and a real pay-roll to do it right. And…

‘Oh, I’m not telling you the truth, Hen! Not the real truth!’

He took to walking around now, making angular gestures. Henry, watching him, coming slowly alive now to the complex life that was flowing around him, found himself confronted by a new, disturbed Humphrey. He had, during the year and more of their friendship, taken him for granted as an older, steadier influence, had leaned on him more than he knew. He had been a rock for the erratic Henry to cling to in the confusing, unstable swirl of life.

‘Hen’ – Humphrey turned on him – ‘you don’t know, but I’m going to be married.’

Henry’s jaw sagged.

‘It’s Mildred, of course.

‘It’s going to be hard on the little woman, Hen. She’s got to get her divorce. She can’t take money from her husband, of course; and she’s only got a little. She’ll need me.’ His voice grew a thought unsteady; he waved his pipe, as if to indicate and explain the machinery. ‘We’ve got to strike out – take the plunge – you know, make a little money. It’s occurred to me… This machinery’s worth more than the library, in a pinch. And I’ve got two bonds left. Just two. They’re money, of course… Hen, you said you lent that thousand to McGibbon?’

Henry nodded. ‘He gave me his note.’

‘Let’s see it.’

Henry ran up the stairs, and returned with a pasteboard box file, which, not without a momentary touch of pride in his quite new business sense, he handed to his friend.

Humphrey glanced at the carefully printed-out phrase on the back – ‘Henry Calverly, 3rd. Business Affairs’ – but did not smile. He opened it and ran through the indexed leaves. It appeared to be empty.

‘Look under “Me,”’ said Henry.

The note was there. ‘For three months,’ Humphrey mused aloud.

Then he smiled. There was a whimsical touch in Humphrey that his few friends knew and loved. Even in this serious crisis it did not desert him. I believe it was even stronger then.

‘Hen,’ he said, ‘got a quarter?’

The smile seemed to restore the rock that Henry had lately clung to. He found himself returning the smile, faintly but with a growing warmth. He replied, ‘Just about.’

‘Match me!’ cried Humphrey.

‘What for?’

‘To settle a very important point. Somebody’s name has got to come first. Best two out of three.’

‘But I don’t – ’

‘Match me! No – it’s mine!.. Now I’ll match you – mine again! I win. Well – that’s settled!’

‘What’s settled? I don’t – ’

Humphrey sat on a tool bench; swung his legs; grinned. ‘Life moves on, Hen,’ he said. ‘It’s a dramatic old world.’

And Henry, puzzled, looking at him, laughed excitedly.

8

It was two o’clock in the afternoon. Simpson Street was quiet after the brisk business of the morning. The air quivered up from the pavement in the still heat. The occasional people about the street moved slowly. The collars of the few visible tradesmen were soft rags around their necks and they mopped red faces with saturated handkerchiefs. The morning breeze had died; the afternoon breeze would drift in at four o’clock or so; until which time Sunbury ladies took their naps and Sunbury business men dozed at their desks. Saturday closing had not made much headway at this period, though the still novel game of golf was beginning to work its mighty change in small-town life.

Through this calm scene, absorbed in their affairs, unaware of the heat, strode Humphrey and Henry – down past the long hotel veranda, where the yellow rocking chairs stood in endless empty rows, past Swanson’s and Donovan’s and Jackson’s book store to the meat market and then, rapidly, up the long stairway.

They found McGibbon with his long legs stretched out under his desk, hands deep in pockets, thin face lined and weary, but eyes nervously bright as always. He was in his shirt-sleeves, of course. His drab brown hair seemed a little longer and even more ragged than usual where it met his wilted collar.

But he grinned at them, and waved a long hand.

‘My God!’ he cried, ‘but it’s good to see a human face. Look!’ His hand swept around, indicating the dusty, deserted desks and the open press-room door. It was still out there; not a man hummed or whistled as he clicked type into his stick, not one of the four job presses rumbled out its cheerful drone of industry.

‘Rats all gone!’ McGibbon added. ‘But the Caliph was up again.’

‘Yes,’ Henry, who found himself suddenly and deeply moved, breathed softly, ‘we know.’

‘Came up a hundred. He’ll pay six hundred now. For all this. An actual investment of more’n four thousand.’ The hand waved again. ‘It’s amusing. He doesn’t know I’m on to him. You see the old fox’s been nosing around to get up a petition to throw me into involuntary bankruptcy, but he can’t find any creditors. Has to be five hundred dollars, you know.’

‘What did you say to him?’ asked Humphrey, thoughtfully.

‘Showed him out. Second time to-day. It was a hard climb for him, too. He did puff some.’

Humphrey slowly drew a large envelope from an inner pocket and laid it on the table at his elbow.

McGibbon eyed it alertly.

‘Here!’ he said, his hand moving up toward the row of four or five cigars that projected from a vest pocket, ‘smoke up, you fellows.’

Henry shook his head. Humphrey drew out his pipe; then raised his head, and said quietly: —

‘Listen!’

There came the unmistakable sound of heavy feet on the stairs. Steadily, step by step, a slowly moving body mounted.

Then, framed in the doorway, stood the huge bulk of Norton P. Boice, breathless, red, and wet of face, his old straw hat pushed back, his yellowish-white, wavy beard covering his necktie and the upper part of his roundly protruding, slightly spotted vest, against which the heavy watch chain with its dangling fraternal insignia stood out prominently.

Boice’s eyes, nearly expressionless, finally settled on Humphrey.

‘What are you doing here?’ he asked, between puffs.

Humphrey’s only reply was a slight impatient gesture.

‘You oughta be at your desk.’

Then he came into the room. Of the three men seated there Humphrey was the only one who knew by certain small external signs, that the Caliph of Simpson Street was blazing with wrath. For here was his own hired lieutenant hobnobbing with the boy whose agile, irresponsible pen had made him the laughing stock of the township and with the intemperate rival who had first attacked and then defied him. And then he had just climbed the stairs for the third and what he meant to be the last time.

He came straight to business.

‘Have you decided to accept my offer?’

‘Sit down,’ said McGibbon, pushing a chair over with his foot.

Boice ignored this final bit of insolence.

‘Have you decided to accept my offer?’

‘Well’ – McGibbon shrugged; spread out his hands – ‘I’ve decided nothing, but as it looks now I may find myself forced to accept it.’

‘Then I suggest that you accept it now.’

‘Well – ’ the hands went out again.

‘Wait a moment,’ said Humphrey.

‘I think you had better go back to the office,’ Boice broke in.

‘Shortly. I have no intention of leaving you in the lurch, Mr Boice. But first I have business here.’

‘You have business!’

‘Yes.’ Humphrey opened the large envelope. ‘Here, McGibbon, is your note to Henry for one thousand dollars, due in November.’

Before their eyes, deliberately, he tore it up, leaned over McGibbon’s legs with an, ‘I beg your pardon!’ and dropped the pieces in the waste-basket. Next he produced a folded document engraved in green and red ink. ‘Here,’ he concluded, ‘is a four per cent, railway bond that stands to-day at a hundred two and a quarter in the market. That’s our price for the Gleaner.’

McGibbon’s nervous eyes followed the movements of Humphrey’s hands as if fascinated. During the hush that followed he sat motionless, chin on breast. Then, slowly, he drew in his legs, straightened up, reached for the bond, turned it over, opened it and ran his eye over the coupons, looked up and remarked: —

‘The paper’s yours.’

‘Then, Mr Boice,’ said Humphrey, ‘the next issue of the Gleaner will be published by Weaver and Calverly, and the stories you object to will run their course.’

But Mr Boice, creaking deliberately over the floor, was just disappearing through the doorway.’

9

The sunlight was streaming in through the living-room of the barn back of the old Parmenter place. Outside the maple leaves were rustling gently. Through the quiet air came the slow booming of the First Presbyterian bell across the block. From greater distances came the higher pitched bell of the Baptist Church, down on Filbert Avenue, and the faint note from the Second Presbyterian over on the West Side, across the tracks.

Humphrey had made coffee and toast. They sat at an end of the centre table. Humphrey in bath-robe and slippers, Henry fully dressed in his blue serge suit, neat silk four-in-hand tie, stiff white collar and carefully polished shoes.

‘Where are you going with all that?’ Humphrey asked.

Henry hesitated; flushed a little.

‘To church,’ he finally replied.

Humphrey’s surprise was real. There had been a time, before they came to know each other, when the boy had sung bass in the quartet at the Second Presbyterian. But since that period he had not been a church-goer. Henry had been quiet all evening, and now this morning. He seemed all boxed up within himself. Preoccupied. As if the triumph over old Boice had merely opened up the way to new responsibilities. Which, for that matter, was just what it had done – done to both of them. Humphrey, not being given to prying, would have let the subject drop here, had not Henry surprised him by breaking hotly forth into words.

‘It’s my big fight, Hump!’ he was saying now. ‘Don’t you see! This town. All they say. Look here!’ He laid a rumpled bit of paper on the table. As if he had been holding it ready in his hand.’

‘Oh, that letter,’ said Humphrey.

‘Yes. It’s what I’ve got to fight. And I’ve got to win. Don’t you see?’

‘Yes,’ Humphrey replied gravely, ‘I see.’

‘I think,’ said Henry, ‘it’s being in love that’s going to help me. We’ve got to hold our heads up, you and I. Build the Gleaner into a real property. Win confidence. And there mustn’t be any doubt. The way we step out and fight, you know. I’ve got to stand with you.’

Humphrey’s eyes strayed to the sunlit window. He suppressed a little sigh.

‘This note’s right enough, in a way,’ Henry went on. ‘It wouldn’t be fair to compromise her.’ He leaned earnestly over the table. ‘It’s really a hopeless love. I know that, Hump. But it isn’t like the others.’ It makes me feel ashamed of them. All of them. I’ve got to show her, or at least show myself, that it’s this love that has made a man of me. Without asking anything, you know.’

Humphrey listened in silence as the talk ran on. The boy was changing, no question about that. Even back of the romantic strain that was colouring his attitude, the suggestion of pose in it, there was real evidence of this change. At least his fighting blood was up. And he was taking punishment.

Sitting there sipping his coffee, Humphrey, half listening, soberly considered his younger friend. Henry was distinctly odd, a square peg in a round world. He was capable of curiously outrageous acts, yet most of them seemed to arise from a downright inability to sense the common attitude, to feel with his fellows. He could be heedless, neglectful, self-centred; but Humphrey had never found meanness or unkindness in him. And he was capable of a passionate generosity. He had, indeed, for Humphrey, the fascination that an erratic and ingenuous but gifted person often exerts on older, steadier natures. You could be angry at him; but you couldn’t get over the feeling that you had to take care of him. And it always seemed, even when he was out and out exasperating, that the thing that was the matter with him was the very quality that underlay his astonishing gifts; that he was really different from others; the difference ran all through, from his unexpected, rather self-centred ways of acting and reacting clear up to the fact that he could write what other people couldn’t write. ‘If they could,’ thought Humphrey now, shrewdly, ‘very likely they’d be different too.’ Take this business of dressing up like a born suburbanite and going to church. It was something of a romantic gesture, But that wasn’t all it was. The fight was real, whatever unexpected things it might lead him to do from day to day.

Herbert de Casselles, wooden-faced, dressed impeccably in frock coat, heavy ‘Ascot’ tie, gray striped trousers perfectly creased, (Henry had never owned a frock coat) ushered him half-way down the long aisle to a seat in Mrs Ellen F. Wilson’s pew. He felt eyes on him as he walked, imagined whispers, and set his face doggedly against them all. He had set out in a sort of fervor; but now the thing was harder to do than he had imagined. The people looked cold and hostile. It was to be a long fight. He might never win. The more successful he might come to be, the more some of them would hate him and fight him down… It was queer, Herb de Casselles ushering him.

The organist slid on to his seat, up in the organ loft behind the pulpit; spread out his music and turned up the corners; pulled and pushed on stops and couplers; glanced up into his narrow mirror; adjusted his tie; fussed again with the stops; began to play.

Henry sat up stiffly, even boldly, and looked about. Across the church, in a pew near the front, sat the Watts: the Senator, on the aisle, looking curiously insignificant with his meek, red face and his little, slightly askew chin beard; Madame Watt sitting wide and high over him, like a stout hawk, chin up, nose down, beady eyes fixed firmly on the pulpit; Cicely Hamlin almost fragile beside her, eyes downcast – or was she looking at the hymns?

When Cicely was talking, with her nervous eagerness, her quick smile, her almost Frenchy gestures, she seemed gay. When in repose, as now, her delicate sensitiveness, her slightly sad expression, were evident, even to Henry.

Made him feel in the closing scene of The Prisoner of Zenda, where he was bidding the Princess who could never be his a last farewell; the mere sight of her thrilled him with a deep romantic sorrow.

Through the prayers, the announcements, the choir numbers and collection, his sacrificial mood grew more and more intense. It was something of a question whether he could hide his emotion before all these hostile people. The long fight ahead to rebuild his name in the village loomed larger and larger, began to take on an aspect that was almost terrifying. For the first time to-day he felt weakness but she made him feel something as Sothem had made in his heart. He sat very quiet, hands clenched on his knees, and unconsciously thrust out his chin a little.

When the doxology was sung and his head was bowed for the benediction, he had to struggle with a mad impulse to rush out, run down the aisle while people were picking up their hats and things. The thing to do, of course, was to take his time, be natural, move out with the rest. This he did, blazing with self-consciousness, his chin forward.

It was difficult. Several persons – older persons, who had known his mother – stopped him and congratulated him on the brilliant work he was doing. This in the midst of the unuttered hostility that seemed like hundreds of little barbed darts penetrating his skin from every side. He could only blush and mumble. Elderly, innocent Mrs Bedford of Filbert Avenue actually introduced him to her nieces from Boston as a young man of whom all Sunbury was proud. He had to blush and mumble here for a long time, while the line of people crowded decorously past.

At last he got to the door. Stiffly raising his hat as one or two groups of young people recognised him, he moved out to the sidewalk. There he raised his eyes. They met, for a fleeting instant, but squarely, over Herb de Casselles’ shoulder, the dark eyes of Cicely Hamlin.

She was sitting on the little forward seat in the black-and-plum Victoria. Madame Watt was settling herself in the back seat. The Senator was stepping in. The plum-coloured footman stood stiffly by. The plum-coloured driver sat stiffly on the box.

Herb de Casselles turned, with a wry smile.

Henry raised his hat, bit his lip, hesitated, hurried on.

Then he heard her voice.

‘Oh, Mr Calverly!’

He had to turn back. He knew he was fiery red. He knew, too, that in this state of tortured bewilderment he couldn’t trust his tongue for a moment.

Cicely leaned out, with outstretched hand.

He had to take it. The thrill the momentary touch of it gave, him but added a wrench to the torture. Then the Senator’s hand had to be taken; finally Madame’s.