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

3

Corinne was peering into the shadows.

‘Where’d they go?’ she said. ‘We’ve got to find them. This thing’s getting worse every minute.’

Mildred and Humphrey were sitting on a horse block, side by side, very still. It was in front of the B. L. Ames place. Corinne stood over them. But Henry hung back; leaned weakly against a tree.

The Ames place brought up memories of other years and other girls. An odd little scene had occurred here, with Clemency Snow, on one of the lawn seats. And a darker mass of shadow in the gnarled, low-spreading oak, over by the side fence, was a well-remembered platform with seats and a ladder to the ground. Ernestine Lambert had been the girl with him up there.

Two long years back! He was eighteen then – a mere boy, with illusions and dreams. He wasn’t welcome to Mary Ames’s any more. She didn’t approve of him. Her mother, too. And he had sunk into a rut of small-town work on Simpson Street. They weren’t fair to him. He didn’t drink; smoked almost none; let the girls alone more than many young fellows – in spite of a few little things. If he had money… of course. You had to have money.

He felt old. And drab of spirit. Those little affairs, even the curious one with Clem Snow, had been, it seemed now, on a higher plane of feeling than this present one with Corinne. Life had been at the spring then, the shrubs dew-pearled, God in his Heaven. And the affair with Ernestine had not been so little. It had shaken him. He wondered where Ernie was now. They hadn’t written for a year and a half. And Clem was Mrs Jefferson Jenkins, very rich (Jeff Jenkins was in a bond house on La Salle Street) living in Chicago, on the Lake Shore Drive, intensely preoccupied with a girl baby. People – women and girls – said it was a beautiful baby. Girls were gushy.

He pressed a hand to his eyes. Corinne was right; the situation was getting worse every minute. During one or two of the minutes, while his memory was active, it had seemed like an unpleasant dream from which he would shortly waken. But it wasn’t a dream. He felt again the tension of it. It was a tension that might easily become unbearable. First thing they knew the university clock would be striking two. He began listening for it; trying absurdly to strain his ears.

He had recently seen Minnie Maddem play Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and had experienced a painful tension much like this – a strain too great for his sensitive imagination. He had covered his face. And he hadn’t gone back for the last act.

But there was to be no running out of this.

‘Well,’ said Corinne, almost briskly, ‘we’re not getting anywhere.’

Humphrey threw out his hand irritably.

‘Just – just wait a little,’ he said. ‘Can’t you see…’

‘It’s past one.’

Corinne’s manner jarred a little on all three of the others. Mildred seemed to sink even closer toward Humphrey.

Henry felt another sob coming. Desperately he swallowed it down.

Humphrey, holding Mildred’s head against his shoulder, looked up at Corinne. His face was not distinctly visible; but he seemed to be studying the tall, easy-going, unexpectedly practical girl.

‘I don’t think you understand,’ he finally said. ‘It’s very, very awkward. My hat is in there.’

‘Where?’

‘In the parlour. On the piano, I think.’

‘I don’t think he lighted the parlour. We three can go up just the same. Now listen. Henry can leave his hat here with you, and get yours when he comes away.’

‘It has my initials in it,’ said Humphrey.

Corinne walked on the grass to the corner; came swiftly back.

‘Well,’ she remarked dryly, ‘he’s been in there. The parlour’s lighted.’

Mildred stirred. ‘Please!’ she murmured. ‘Just give me a minute or two. I’m going with you.’

‘Suppose,’ said Corinne, ‘he has seen the initials.’

Mildred’s eyes sought Humphrey’s. For a long instant, her head back on his shoulder, she gazed at him with an intensity that Henry had not before seen on a woman’s face. It was as if she had forgotten himself and Corinne. And then Humphrey’s arm tightened about her, as if he, too, had forgotten every one and everything else.

Henry had to turn away.

He walked to the corner. Neither Humphrey nor Mildred knew whether he went or stayed. Corinne was frowning down at them; thinking desperately.

Henry stared at the house, at the dim solitary figure on the top step, at the little red light of the cigar that came and went with the puffs.

Henry was breathing hard. His face was burning hot. He hated conflicts, fights; hated them so deeply, felt so inadequate when himself involved, that emotion usually overcame him. Therefore he fought rather frequently, and, on occasions, rather effectively. Emotion will win a fight as often as reason.

He considered getting Humphrey to one side, making him listen to reason. He dwelt on the phrase. The mere thought of Mildred being driven back into that house, into the hands of her legal husband, stirred that tendency to sob. He set his teeth on it. They could take her back to the rooms. He would move out. For that matter, if it would save her reputation, they could both move out. At once. But would it save her reputation?

He took off his hat; pressed a hand to his forehead; then fussed with his little moustache. Then, as a new thought was born in his brain, born of his emotions, he gave a little start. He looked back at the shadowy group about the Ames’s horse block. Apparently they hadn’t moved. He looked at his shoes, tennis shoes with rubber soles.

He laid hat and stick on the ground by a tree; went little way up the street, past the circle of the corner light and slipped across; moved swiftly, keeping on the grass, around to the alley, came in at the Henderson’s back gate, made his way to the side steps.

There was a door here that led into an entry. There were doors to kitchen and dining-room on right and left, and the back stairs. Henry knew the house. Kitchen and dining-room were both dark now, but the lights were on in parlour and hall.

He got the screen door open without a sound and felt his way into and through the dining-room. It seemed to him that there were a great many chairs in that diningroom. His shins bumped them. They met his outspread hands. Between this room and the parlour the sliding doors were shut.

He stood a moment by these doors, wondering if Arthur V. Henderson was still sitting on the top step with his back to the front screen door. Probably. He couldn’t very well move without some noise. But it would be impossible to see him out there, with the parlour light on.

‘Deliberately, with extreme caution, her slid back one of the doors. It rumbled a little. He waited, keeping back in the dark, and listened. There was no sound from the porch.

The piano stood against the side wall, near the front. On it lay Humphrey’s straw hat. Any one by merely looking into it could have seen the initials. And the man on the steps had only to turn his head and look in through the bay window to see piano, hat, and any one who stood near, any one, in fact, in that diagonal half of the room.

Henry held his breath and stepped in, nearly to the centre of the room. Here he hesitated.

Then beginning slowly, not unlike the sound of a wagon rolling over a distant bridge, a rumbling fell on his ears. It grew louder. It ended in a little bang.

4

Henry glanced behind him. The sliding door had closed. There was a scuffling of feet on the steps.

Henry reached up and switched off the electric lamp in the chandelier.

Then he stepped forward, found the piano, felt along the top, closed his fingers on the hat, and stood motionless. His first thought was that he would probably be shot.

There were steps on the porch. The front door opened and closed. Mr Henderson was standing in the hall now, but not in the parlour doorway. Probably just within the screen door. The hall light put him at a disadvantage; and he couldn’t turn it out without crossing that parlour doorway.

‘Who’s there!’ Mr Henderson’s voice was quiet enough. It sounded tired, and nervous. ‘Come out o’ there quick! Whoever you are!’

Henry was silent. He wasn’t particularly frightened. Not now. He even felt some small relief. But he was confronted with some difficulty in deciding what he ought to do.

‘Come out O’ there!’

Then Henry replied: ‘All right.’ And came to the hall doorway.

Mr Henderson was leaning a little forward, fists clenched, ready for a spring. He still had the cigar in his mouth. But he dropped back now and surveyed the youth who stood, white-faced, clasping a straw hat tightly under his left arm. He seemed to find it difficult to speak; shifted the cigar about his mouth with mobile lips. He even thrust his hands into his pockets and looked the youth up and down.

‘I came for this hat,’ said Henry. ‘It was on the piano.’

Still Mr Henderson’s eyes searched him up, and down. Eyes that would be sleepy again as soon as this little surprise was over. And they were red, with puffs under them. He was a tall man, with big athletic shoulders and deep chest, but with signs of a beginning corpulence, the physical laxity that a good many men fall into who have been athletes in their teens and twenties but are now getting on into the thirties.

It was understood here and there in Sunbury that he had times of drinking rather hard. Indeed, the fact had been dwelt on by one or two tolerant or daring souls who ventured to speak a word for his wife. She had always quickly and willingly given her services as pianist at local entertainments. Perhaps because, with all her brisk self-possession, she must have been hungry for friends. She played exceptionally well, with some real style and with an almost perverse touch of humour. She was quick, crisp, capable. She disliked banality. To the initiated her playing of Chopin was a joy. The sentimentalists said that she had technique but no feeling. She could really play Bach. And I think she was the most accomplished accompanist that ever lived in Sunbury; certainly the best within my memory.

‘Say’ – thus Mr Henderson now – ‘you’re Henry Calverly, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I’d like to know what you’re doing here.’

‘I told you. I came for this hat.’

‘Your hat?’

‘Didn’t you see the initials?’

‘No. I noticed the hat there. Why didn’t you come in the front way? What’s all this burglar business?’

Henry didn’t answer.

‘I’ll have to ask you to answer that question. You seem to forget that this is my house.’

‘No, I don’t forget that.’

Mr Henderson took out his cigar; turned it in his fingers. Colour came to his face. He spoke abruptly, in a suddenly rising voice.

‘Seems to me there’s some mighty queer goings-on around here. Sneaking in at two in the morning!’

‘It isn’t two in the morning.’

‘Dam’ near it.’

‘It isn’t half-past one. I tell you – ’ Henry paused.

His position seemed rather weak.

Mr Henderson studied his cigar again. He drew a cigar case from an inside pocket.

‘I don’t know’s I offered you one,’ he said. He almost muttered it.

‘I don’t smoke,’ said Henry shortly.

Mr Henderson resumed the excited tone. It was curious coming in that jumpy way. Even Henry divined the weakness back of it and grew calmer.

‘I’ve been out on – ’ He paused. Mildred had trained him not to use the phrase, ‘on the road.’ He resumed with, ‘ – on a business trip. More’n a month. I swan, I’m tired out. Way trains and country hotels. Fierce! If I seem nervous… Look here, you seem pretty much at home! Perhaps you’ll tell me where my wife is!’

Henry considered this. Shook his head.

‘Trying to make me think you don’t know, eh!’

‘I do know.’

Mr Henderson knit his brows over this. Then, instead of immediately pressing the matter, he took out a fresh cigar and lighted it with the butt of the old one.

‘Seems to me you ought to tell me,’ he said then.

‘I can’t.’

‘That’s queer, ain’t it?’

‘Well, it’s true. I can’t.’

‘She wrote me that she had Corinne Doag visiting here.’

‘Yes. She’s here.’

‘With my wife? Now?’

Henry bowed. He felt confused, and more than a little tired. And he disliked this man, deeply. Found him depressing. But outwardly – he didn’t himself dream this – he presented a picture of austere dignity. An effect that was intensified, if anything, by his youth.

‘Anybody else with her and Corinne?’

Henry bowed again.

‘A man?’

‘Yes.’ Henry was finding him disgusting now. But he must be extremely careful. An unnecessary word might hurt Mildred or Humphrey. Good old Hump!

Mr Henderson turned the fresh cigar round and round, looking intently at it. In a surprisingly quiet manner he asked: —

‘Why doesn’t she come home?’

Henry looked at the man. Anger swelled within him.

‘Because you’re here?’ He bit the sentence off.

He felt stifled. He wanted to run out, past the man, and breathe in the cool night air.

Mr Henderson looked up, then down again at the cigar. Then he pushed open the screen door.

‘May as well sit down and talk this over,’ he said. ‘Cooler on the porch. Dam’ queer line o’ talk. You’re young, Calverly. You don’t know life. You don’t understand these things. My God! When I think… Well, what is it? You seem to be in on this. Speak out! Tell me what she wants. That’s one thing about me – I’m straight out. Fair and square. Give and take. I’m no hand for beating about the bush. Come on with it. What does she think I ought to do?’

‘I can’t tell you what she thinks.’ Henry was downright angry now.

‘Oh, yes! It’s easy for you! You haven’t been through…’ His face seemed to be working. And his voice had a choke in it. ‘But how could a kid like you understand I How could you know the way you get tied up and… all the little things… My God, man! It hurts. Can you understand that. It’s tough.’ He subsided. Finally, after a long silence, he said huskily but quietly, with resignation, ‘You’d say I ought to go.’

Henry was silent.

Mr Henderson got up.

‘I guess I know how to be a sport,’ he said.

He went into the house, and in a few minutes returned with his suit-case.

‘It’s – it’s sorta like leaving things all at loose ends,’ he remarked. ‘But then – of course…’

He went down two or three steps; then paused and looked up at Henry, who had risen now.

‘You’ – his voice was husky again – ‘you staying here?’

‘No,’ said Henry; and walked a way up the street with him.

Mr Henderson said, rather stiffly, that the hot spell really seemed to be over. Been fierce. Especially through Iowa and Missouri. No lake breeze, or anything like that. Muggy all the time. That was the thing here in Sunbury – the lake breeze.’

5

They were still in front of the Ames place. But Mildred had risen. They stood watching him as he came, carrying the hat.

‘Where on earth have you been?’ asked Corinne.

Henry met with difficulty in replying. He was embarrassed, caught in an uprush of self-consciousness. He couldn’t see why there need be talk. He gave Humphrey his hat.

‘How’d you get this?’

‘In there.’

‘You went in?’ This from Mildred. He felt her eyes on him.

‘Yes.’

‘But you – you must have…’

‘He’s gone.’

‘Gone!’

‘Yes.’

‘But where?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What did you tell him?’ asked Corinne sharply’.

‘Nothing. I don’t think I did. Nothing much.’

‘But what?’

‘Well, he acted funny. I wouldn’t tell him where Mildred was. Then he asked why you didn’t come home and I said because he was there.’

Mildred and Corinne looked at each other.

‘But what made him go?’ asked Corinne.

‘I don’t know. He wanted to know what you wanted him to do, Mildred. Of course I couldn’t say anything to that. And then he said he guessed he knew how to be a sport, and went and got his suit-case.’

‘Hope he had sense enough not to go to the hotel,’ Corinne mused, aloud. ‘They’d talk so.’

‘There’s a train back to Chicago at two-something,’ said Humphrey.

They moved slowly toward the house. At the steps they paused.

The university clock struck two.

They listened. The reverberations of the second stroke died out. The maple leaves overhead rustled softly. From the beach, a block away, came the continuous low sound of little waves on shelving sand. The great lake that washes and on occasions threatens the shore at Sunbury had woven, from Henry’s birth, a strand of colour in the fibre of his being. He felt the lake as deeply as he felt the maples and oaks of Sunbury; memories of its bars of crude’ wonderful colour at sunset and sunrise, of its soft mists, its yellow and black November storms, its reaches of glacier-like ice-hills in winter, of moonlit evenings with a girl on the beach when the romance of youth shimmered in boundless beautiful mystery before half-closed eyes – these were an ever-present element in the undefined, moody ebb and flow of impulse, memory, hope, desire and spasmodic self-restraint that Henry would have referred to, if at all, as his mind.

‘It’s late enough,’ said Corinne, with a little laugh.

Mildred turned away, placed a tiny foot on the bottom step, sighed, then murmured, very low, ‘Hardly worth while going in.’

‘Let’s not,’ muttered Humphrey.

‘Listen.’ Thus Corinne. She was leaning against the railing, with an extraordinarily graceful slouch. She had never looked so pretty, Henry thought. A little of the corner light reached her face, illuminating her velvet clear skin and shining on her blue black hair where it curved over her forehead. She made you think of health and of wild things. And she could, even at this time, earn her living. There was an offer now to tour the country forty weeks with a lyceum concert company. The letter had come to-day; Henry had seen it. She thought she wouldn’t accept. Her idea was another year to study, then two or three years abroad and, possibly, a start in the provincial opera companies of Italy, Austria, and Germany. Yes, she had character of the sort that looks coolly ahead and makes deliberate plans. Despite her wide, easy-smiling mouth and her great languorous black eyes and her lazy ways, eyen Henry could now see this strength in her face, in its solid, squared-up framework. More than any girl Henry had ever known she could do what she chose. Men pursued her, of course. All the time. There were certain extremely persistent ones. And it came quietly through, bit by bit, that she knew them pretty well, knocked around the city with them, as she liked. But now she had chosen himself. No doubt about it.

She said: —

‘Listen. Let’s go down to the shore and watch for the sunrise. We couldn’t sleep a wink after – after this – anyway.’

‘Nobody’d ever know,’ breathed Mildred.

Humphrey took her arm. They moved slowly down the walk toward the street.

Corinne, still leaning there, looked at Henry.

He reached toward her, but she evaded him and waltzed slowly away over the grass, humming a few bars of the Myosotis.

Henry’s eyes followed her. He felt the throbbing again in his temples, and his cheeks burned. He compressed his lips. He moved after her. He was in a state of all but ungovernable excitement, but the elation of two hours back had gone, flattened out utterly. He felt deeply uncomfortable. It was the sort of ugly moment in which he couldn’t have faced himself in a looking-glass. For Henry had such moments, when, painfully bewildered by the forces that nature implants in the vigorously young, he loathed himself. Life opened, a black precipice, before him, yet Life, in other guise, drove him on. As if intent on his destruction.

He hung back; let Corinne glide on just ahead of him, still slowing revolving, swaying, waltzing to the soft little tune she was so musically humming. He wanted to watch her; however great his discomfort of the spirit, to exult in her physical charm.

On the earlier occasion when she had overtaxed his emotional capacity he had got out of it by using the forces she stirred in him as a stimulant. But now he wasn’t stimulated. Not, at least, in that way. His spirit seemed to be dead. Only his body was alive. All the excitement of the evening had played with cumulative force on his nerves. He had arrived at an emotional crisis; and was facing it sullenly but unresistingly.