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

5

As they were turning into the Voice office, Henry caught sight of Mamie Wilcox, in a cheap pink dress and flapping pink-and-white hat, loitering by the hotel. He fell back behind Humphrey. Mamie beckoned with her head. He nodded, and entered the office; and she moved slowly on around the corner of the avenue.

He mumbled a rather unnecessary excuse to Humphrey, and slipped out, catching up with her on the avenue. She was unpleasantly attractive. She excited him.

‘What is it?’ he asked, walking with her. ‘Did you want to speak to me?’

‘Stuck up, aren’t we!’

‘Well?’

She pouted. ‘Take a little walk with me. I do want to talk with you.’

‘Haven’t time. Got to get right back to the office.’

‘Well – listen, meet me to-night. I can get out by eight. It’s pretty important. Maybe serious.’

‘Is it – did anybody – ’

She nodded. ‘Mrs MacPherson. She was right in her door when I came out of your room.’

‘Did she say anything?’

‘She looked a lot.’

‘Well, say – I’ll see you for a few minutes to-night. Say about eight.’ This was best. It would be dark, or near it. He simply mustn’t be seen strolling with Mamie Wilcox along Filbert Avenue in broad daylight. ‘What do you say to Douglass Street and the Lake Shore Drive?’

‘All right. Tell you what – bring a tandem along and take me for a ride.’

‘Oh, I can’t.’ But his will was weak. ‘Got to report a concert. I don’t know, though. I s’pose I could get around at half-past nine’ or ten and hear the last numbers.’

He had often done this. Besides, he could probably manage it earlier. He knew he could rent a tandem at Murphy’s cigar store down by the tracks. A quite wild, wholly fascinating stir of adventure was warming his breast and bringing that huskiness into his voice. He was letting go. He felt daring and a little mad. He hadn’t realised, before to-day, that Mamie had such a lure about her.

Before returning to the office he got his bank-book and brazenly drew from the bank, savings department, his entire account, amounting to ten dollars forty-six cents. He also bespoke the tandem.

These were the great days of bicycling. The first highwheeled, rattling horseless carriage was not to appear in the streets of Sunbury for a year or two yet. Bicycle clubs flourished. Memorial Day each year (they called it Decoration Day) was a mad rush of excursion and road races. Every Sunday witnessed a haggard-eyed humpbacked horde of ‘Scorchers’ in knickerbockers or woollen tights. Many of the young men one met on train and street wore medals with a suspended chain of gold bars, one for each ‘century run.’

And these were the first great days of the bloomer girl. She was legion. Sometimes her bloomers were bloomers, sometimes they were knickerbockers, sometimes little more than the tights of the racing breed. She was dusty, sweaty, loud. She was never the sort of girl you knew; but always appeared from the swarming, dingy back districts of the city. Sometimes she rode a single wheel, sometimes tandem with some male of the humpbacked breed and of the heavily muscled legs and the grotesquely curved handle bars. The bloomer girl was looked at askance by the well-bred folk of the shaded suburbs. Ministers thumped pulpits and harangued half-empty pews regarding this final moral, racial disaster while she rode dustily by the very doors.

Henry, as he pedalled the long machine through back streets to the rendezvous, was glad that the twilight was falling fast. In his breast pocket were copy paper and pencils, in an outer pocket his little olive-green book. His white trousers were caught about the ankles with steel dips.

Mamie kept him waiting. He hid both himself and the wheel in the shadows of the tall lilac bushes in the little village park.

She came at length, said ‘Hello!’ and with a little deft unhooking, coolly stepped out of her skirt, rolled up that garment, thrust it under a bush, and stood before him in the sort of wheeling costume rarely seen in Sunbury save on Saturdays and Sundays when the Chicago crowds were pouring through.

Henry stood motionless, silent, in the dusk.

‘Well,’ said she, smartly, ‘are we riding?’

Without a word he wheeled out the bicycle and they rolled away.

She was very close, there before him. She bent over the handle bars like an old-timer, and pedalled with something more than the abandon of a boy. It was going to be hard to talk to her… If he could only blot this day out of his life. ‘She started it,’ he thought fiercely, staring out ahead over her rhythmically moving shoulder. ‘I never asked her to come in!’

‘I didn’t know you rode a wheel,’ said he, after a time, dismally.

‘I ride Sundays with the boys from Pennyweather Point. But you needn’t tell that at home.’

‘I’m not telling anything at home,’ muttered Henry. Then she flung back at him the one word.

‘Surprised?’

‘Well – why, sorta.’

‘You thought I was satisfied to do the room work and wash dishes, I suppose!’

‘I don’t know as I thought anything.’

‘What’s the matter, anyway? Scared at my bloomers?’

‘That’s what you call’em, is it?’

‘I must say you’re grand company.’

He made no reply.

They pedalled past the university buildings, the athletic field, the lighthouse, up a grade between groves of oak, out along the brink of a clay bluff overlooking the steely dark lake – horizonless, still, a light or two twinkling far out.

‘Shall we go to Hoffman’s?’ she asked.

‘I don’t care where we go,’ said he.

6

The Weekly Voice of Sunbury was put to press every Friday evening, was printed during that night, and appeared in the first mail on Saturday mornings.

Friday, therefore, was the one distractingly busy day for Humphrey Weaver. And it was natural enough that he should snatch at Henry’s pencilled report of the musicale at Mrs Henderson’s with the briefest word of greeting, and give his whole mind, blue copy-editing pencil posed in air, to reading it. But he did note that the boy looked rather haggard, as if he hadn’t slept much. He heard his mumbled remark that he had been over at the public library, writing the thing; and perhaps wondered mildly and momentarily why the boy should be writing at the library and not at home, and why he should speak of the fact at all. And now and again during the day he was aware of Henry, pale, dog-eyed, inclined to hang about as if confidences were trembling on his tongue. And he was carrying a little olive-green book around; drew it from his pocket every now and then and read or turned the pages with an ostentatious air of concentration, as if he wanted to be noticed. Humphrey decided to ask him what the trouble was; later, when the paper was put away. When he might have spoken, old man Boice was there, at his desk. And Humphrey never got out to meals on Fridays. Henry got all his work in on time: the ‘Real Estate Notes’ for the week and the last items for ‘Along Simpson Street.’

The report of the musicale would have brought a smile or two on another day. There was nearly a column of it. Henry had apparently been deeply moved by the singing of Anne Mayer Stelton. He dwelt on the ‘velvet suavity’ of her legato passages, her firmness of attack and the ‘delicate lace work of her colourature.’ ‘Mme. Stelton’s art,’ he wrote, ‘has deepened and broadened appreciably since she last appeared in Sunbury. Always gifted with a splendid singing organ, always charming in personality and profoundly rhythmically musical in temperament, she now has added a superstructure of technical authority, which gives to each passage, whether bravura or pianissimo, a quality and distinction seldom heard in this country. Miss Corinne Doag also added immeasurably to the pleasure of the select audience by singing a group of songs. Miss Corinne Doag has a contralto voice of fine verve and timbre. She is a guest of Mrs Henderson, who herself accompanied delightfully. Among those present were: – ’

Henry’s writing always startled you a little. Words fairly flowed through his pencil, long words, striking words. He had the word sense; this when writing. In speech he remained just about where he had been all through his teens, loose of diction, slurring and eliding and using slang as did most of the Middle-Westerners among whom he had always lived, and, like them, swallowing his tongue down his throat.

Humphrey initialed the copy, tossed it into the devil’s basket, turned to a pile of proofs, paused as if recollecting something, picked up the copy again, glanced rapidly through it, and turned on his assistant.

‘Look here, Hen,’ he remarked, ‘you don’t tell what they sang, either of ‘em. Or who were among those present.’

Henry was reading his little book at the moment, and fumbling at his moustache. A mournful object.

He turned now, with a start, and stared, wide-eyed, at Humphrey. His lips parted, but he didn’t speak. A touch of colour appeared in his cheeks.

Then, as abruptly, he went limp in his chair.

‘I thought she left a list here and a programme,’ he said, eyes now on the floor.

Humphrey’s practised eye ran swiftly over the double row of pigeonholes before him. ‘Right you are!’ he exclaimed.

It was a quarter past eleven that night when Humphrey scrawled his last ‘O.K.’; stretched out his long form in his swivel chair; yawned; said, ‘Well, that’s done, thank God!’; and hummed and tapped out on his bare desk the refrain of a current song: —

He turned on Henry with a wrinkly, comfortable grin.

‘Well, my boy, it’s too late for Stanley’s but what do you say to a bite at Ericson’s, over by the tracks?’

Then he became fully aware of the woebegone look of the boy, fiddling eternally with that moustache, fingering the leaves of his little book, and added: —

‘What on earth is the matter with you!’

Henry gazed long at his book, swallowed, and said weakly: —

‘I’m in trouble, Humphrey.’

‘Oh, come, not so bad as all – ’

He was silenced by the sudden plaintive appeal on Henry’s face. Mr Boice, a huge-slow-moving figure of a man with great white whiskers, was coming in from the press room.

They walked down to the little place by the tracks. Humphrey had a roast-beef sandwich and coffee; Henry gloomily devoured two cream puffs.

There Humphrey drew out something of the story. It was difficult at first. Henry could babble forth his most sacred inner feelings with an ingenuous volubility that would alarm a naturally reticent man, and he could be bafflingly secretive. To-night he was both, and neither. He was full of odd little spiritual turnings and twistings – vague as to the clock, intent on justifying himself, submerged in a boundless bottomless sea of self-pity. Humphrey, touched, even worried, finally went at him with direct questions, and managed to piece out the incident of the Thursday morning in the boy’s room.

‘But I never asked her in,’ he hurried to explain. ‘She came in. Maybe after that it was my fault, but I didn’t ask her in.’

‘But as far as I can see, Hen, it wasn’t so serious. You didn’t make love to her.’

‘I tried to.’

‘Oh yes. She doubtless expected that. But she got away.’

‘But don’t you see, Hump, Mrs MacPherson saw her coming out. She’d been snooping. Musta heard some of it. That’s why Mamie hung around for me yesterday noon.’

‘Oh, she hung around?’

Henry swallowed, and nodded. ‘That’s why I slipped out again after lunch yesterday. I didn’t want to tell you.’

‘Naturally. A man’s little flirtations – ’

‘But wait, Hump! She was excited about it. And she seemed to think it was up to me, somehow. I couldn’t get rid of her.’

‘Well, of course – ’

‘She made me promise to see her last night – ’

‘But – wait a minute! – last night – ’

‘This was the first part of the evening. She made me promise to rent Murphy’s tandem – ’

‘Hm! you were going it!’

‘And we rode up the shore a ways.’

‘Then you didn’t hear all of the musicale?’

‘No. She wanted to go up to Hoffmann’s Garden. So we went there – ’

‘But good lord, that’s six miles – ’

‘Eight. You can do it pretty fast with a tandem. The place was jammed. I felt just sick about it. The waiter made us walk clear through, past all the tables. I coulda died. You see, Mamie, she – but I had to be a sport, sorta.’

‘Oh, you had to go through with it, of course.’

‘Sure! I had to. It was awful.’

‘Anybody there that knew you?’

Henry’s colour rose and rose. He gazed down intently at the remnant of a cream puff; pushed it about with his fork. Then his lips formed the word, ‘Yes.’

Humphrey considered the problem. ‘Well,’ he finally observed, ‘after all, what’s the harm? It may embarrass you a little. But most fellows pick up a girl now and then. It isn’t going to kill anybody.’

‘Yes, but’ – Henry’s emotions seemed to be all in his throat to-night; he swallowed – ‘but it – well, Martha was there.’

‘Oh – Martha Caldwell?’

‘Yes. And Mary Ames and her mother. They were with Mr Merchant’s party.’

‘James B., Junior?’

‘Yes. They drove up in a trap. I saw it outside. We weren’t but three tables away from them. They saw everything. Mamie, she – ’

‘After all, Hen. It’s disturbing and all that, but you were getting pretty tired of Martha – ’

‘It isn’t that, Hump 1 I don’t know that I was. I get mixed. But it’s the shame, the disgrace. The Ameses have been down on me anyway, for something that happened two years ago. And now…! And Martha, she’s – well, can’t you see, Hump? It’s just as if there’s no use of my trying to stay in this town any longer. They’ll all be down on me now. They’ll whisper about me. They’re doing it now. I feel it when I walk up Simpson Street. They’re going to mark me for that kind of fellow, and I’m not.’

His face sank into his hands.

Humphrey considered him; said, ‘Of course you’re not;’ considered him further. Then he said, reflectively: ‘It’s unpleasant, of course, but I’ll confess I can’t see that what you’ve told me justifies the words “shame” and “disgrace.” They’re strong words, my boy. And as for leaving town… See here, Hen | Is there anything you haven’t told me?’

The bowed head inclined a little farther.

‘Hadn’t you better tell me? Did anything happen afterward? Has the girl got – well, a real hold on you?’ The head moved slowly sidewise. ‘We fought afterward, all the way home. Rowed. Jawed at each other like a pair of little muckers. No, it isn’t that. I hated her all the time. I told her I was through with her. She tried to catch me in the hall this morning, up on the third floor. Came sneaking to my room again. With towels. That’s why I wrote in the library.’

‘But you aren’t telling me what the rest of it was.’

‘She – oh, she drank beer, and – ’

‘That’s what most everybody does at Hoffmann’s. The beer’s good there.’

‘I don’t know. I don’t like the stuff.’

‘Come, Hen, tell me. Or drop it. Either.’

‘I’ll tell you. But I get so mad. It’s – she – well, she wore pants.’

Humphrey’s sympathy and interest were real, and he did not smile as he queried: ‘Bloomers?’

‘No, pants. Britches. I never saw anything so tight. Nothing else like ‘em in the whole place. People nudged each other and laughed and said things, right out loud. Hump, it was terrible. And we walked clear through – past hundreds of tables – and away over in the corner – and there were the Ameses, and Martha, and – ’

His head was up now; there was fire in his eyes; his voice trembled with the passion of a profound moral indignation.

‘Hump, she’s tough. She rides with that crowd from Pennyweather Point. She smokes cigarettes. She – she leads a double life.’

And neither did it occur to Humphrey, looking at the blazing youth before him, to smile at that last remark.

Humphrey had reached a point of real concern over Henry. He thought about him the last thing that night – pictured him living a lonely, spasmodically ascetic life, in the not over cheerful boarding-house of Mrs Wilcox – and the first thing the next morning.

The curious revelation of the later morning nettled him, perhaps, as a responsible editor, but, if anything, deepened his concern. He had the boy on his conscience, that was the size of it. He thought him over all the morning, before and after the revelation. After it he smoked steadily and hard, and knit his brows, and shook his head gravely, and chuckled.

Henry always came in between half-past eleven and twelve Saturdays to clip his contributions from the paper and paste them, end to end, in a ‘string.’ Then Humphrey would measure the string with a two-foot rule and fill out an order on the Voice Company for payment at the rate of a dollar and a quarter a column, or something less than seven cents an inch. Henry despairing of a raise from nine dollars a week had, months back, elected to work ‘on space.’

That the result had not been altogether happy – he was averaging something less than nine dollars a week now – does not concern us here.

Humphrey contrived to keep busy until the string was made and measured; then proposed lunch.

At Stanley’s, the food ordered, he leaned on his lank elbows and surveyed the dejected young man before him.

‘Hen,’ he remarked dryly, ‘do you really think Anne Mayer Stelton’s voice has a velvet suavity?’

Henry glanced up from his barley soup, coloured perceptibly, then dropped his eyes and consumed several spoonfuls of the tepid fluid.

‘Why not?’ said he.

‘You feel, do you, that her art has deepened and broadened appreciably since she last appeared in Sunbury?’

Henry centred all his attention on the soup.

‘You feel that she has really added a superstructure of technique during her study abroad?’

Henry’s ears were scarlet now.

Humphrey, his soup turning cold between his elbows, looked steadily at his deeply unhappy friend.

For a moment longer Henry went on eating. But then he quietly laid down his spoon, sank rather limply back in his chair, and wanly met Humphrey’s gaze.

‘There was a moment this morning, Hen, when I could have wrung your neck. A moment.’

Henry’s voice was colourless. His expression was that of a man who has absorbed his maximum of punishment, to whom nothing more matters much. ‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘What happened?’

‘Madame Stelton fell in the Chicago station, hurrying for the train, and sprained her ankle. Miss Doag gave the entire programme.’

Henry sat a little time considering this. Finally he raised his eyes.

‘Hump,’ he said, ‘I don’t know that I’m sorry. I’m rather glad you caught me, I think.’

It was a difficult speech to meet. Humphrey even found it a moving speech.

‘You had an unlucky day,’ he said.

Henry nodded. The roast beef and potato were before them now; but Henry pushed his aside. He ate nothing more.

‘Mrs Henderson was in,’ Humphrey added. ‘I don’t care what they say about her, she’s a really pretty woman and bright as all get out.’

‘Was she mad, Hump?’

‘I – well, yes, I gathered the impression that you’d better not try to talk to her for a while. There she was, you see – came straight down to the office or stopped on her way to the train. Had Miss Doag along. Unusual dark brown eyes – almost black. A striking girl. But you won’t meet her – not this trip. Though she couldn’t help laughing once or twice. Over your phrases. You see you laid it on unnecessarily thick. Verve. Timbre. It puts you – I won’t say in a Bad light – but certainly in a rather absurd light.’

‘Yes,’ said Henry, gently, meekly, ‘it does. It sorta completes the thing. I picked up some of the town talk this morning. They’re laughing at me. And Martha cut me dead, not an hour ago. I’ve lost my friends. I’m sort of an outcast, I suppose. A – a pariah.’

There was a long silence.

‘You’d better eat some food,’ said Humphrey.

‘I can’t.’ Henry was brooding, a tired droop to his mouth, a look of strain about the eyes. He began thinking aloud, rather aimlessly. ‘It ain’t as if I did that sort of thing. I never asked her to come in. I couldn’t very well refuse to talk with her. She suggested the tandem. It did seem like a good idea to get her out of town, if I had to risk being seen with her. I’ll admit I got mixed – awfully. I don’t suppose I knew just what I was doing. But it was the first time in two years. Hump, you don’t know how hard I’ve – ’

‘It’s the first-time offenders that get most awfully caught,’ observed Humphrey. ‘But never mind that now. You’re caught, Hen. No good explaining. You’ve just got to live it down.’

‘That’s what I’ve been doing for two years – living things down. And look where it’s brought me. I’m worse off than ever.’

There was a slight quivering in his voice that conveyed an ominous suggestion to Humphrey.

‘Mustn’t let the kid sink this way,’ he thought. Then, aloud: ‘Here’s a little plan I want to suggest, Hen. You’re stale. You’re taking this too hard. You need a change.’

‘I don’t like to leave town, exactly, Hump – as if I was licked. I’ve changed about that.’

‘You’re not going to leave town. You’re coming over to live with me. Move this afternoon.’

Henry seemed to find difficulty in comprehending this. Humphrey, suddenly a victim of emotion, pressed on, talking fast. ‘I’ll be through by four. You be packing up. Get an expressman and fetch your things. Here’s my key. I’ll let you pay something. We’ll get our breakfasts.’

He had to stop. It struck him as silly, letting this forlorn youth touch him so deeply. He gulped down a glass of water. ‘Come on,’ he said brusquely, ‘let’s get out.’ And on the street he added, avoiding those bewildered dog eyes – ‘I’m going to reshuffle you and deal you out fresh.’ That’s all you need, a new deal.’

But to himself he added: ‘It won’t be easy. He is taking it hard. He’s unstrung. I’ll have to work it out slowly, head him around, build up his confidence. Teach him to laugh again. It’ll take time, but it can be done. He’s good material. Get him out of that dam boardinghouse to start with.’