1
Elberforce Jenkins was the most accomplished very young man-about-town in Sunbury. He appeared to have, even at twenty-one, the bachelor gift. He danced well. His golf was more than promising. He had lately taken up polo with the Dexter Smith boys and young de Casselles. He owned two polo ponies, a schooled riding horse, and a carriage team which he drove to a high cart. His allowance from his father by far overcame the weakness of his salary (he was with his brother, Jefferson, in a bond house on La Salle Street). His aptitude at small talk amounted to a gift. He liked, inevitably, the play that was popular and (though he read little) the novel that was popular. His taste in girls pointed him unerringly toward the most desirable among the newest.
He and Henry had been together in high school (Sunbury was democratic then). They had played together in the football team. They had—during one hectic month—been rivals for the hand of Ernestine Lambert.
In that instance, in so far as success had come, it had come to Henry. But those were Henry's big days, when he was directing Iolanthe, the town at his feet. Life, these two years, had flowed swiftly on. The long dangling figure of Elbow Jenkins had filled out. His crude boyishness had given way to a smiling reserve. He was a young man of the world—self-assured, never indiscreet of tongue, always well-mannered, never individual or interesting.
While Henry still worked on Simpson Street. He hadn't struck his gait. He was—if you bothered, these days, to think about him—a little queer. He wore that small moustache and a heavy cord hanging from his nose-glasses, and dressed a thought too conspicuously. As if impelled by some inner urge to assert a personality that might otherwise be overlooked.... As I glance back upon the Henry of this period, it seems to me that there was more than a touch of pathos about that moustache. It was such a soft little thing. He fussed with it so much, and kept trying to twist it up at the ends. He didn't seem to know that they weren't twisting moustaches up at the ends that year. In fact, I think he lacked almost utterly the gift of conformity which was the strongest, element in Elbow Jenkins's nature. And he never acquired it. In education, in work and preparation for life, he went it alone, stumbling, blundering, doing apparently stupid things, acting from baffling obscure motives, then suddenly coming through with an unexpected flash of insight and power.
From the period of Ernestine Lambert to the time of the present story Elbow Jenkins had been on Henry's nerves. Whenever they met, that is; or when Henry saw him driving the newest, prettiest, best-dressed girl about in his cart. Two years earlier he would have had two ponies hitched tandem. But now, a little older, less willing to be conspicuous except in strict conformity with the conventions, he drove his carefully matched team side by side. His scat, his hold of the reins, the very turning-back of his tan gloves, all were correct. These, indeed, were details in the problem of living and moving about with success among one's fellows that Elberforce Jenkins regarded as really important. Like one's stance at golf, and cultivating the favour of men who could be influential in a business or social way.
Yes, Elbow was on Henry's nerves.
But Elbow had long since forgotten Henry, except for a chance nod now and then. And occasionally a moment's annoyance that Henry should insist on keeping alive a nickname that had with years and the beginnings of dignity become undesirable.
2
The blow fell on Henry at half-past five on the Tuesday.
I mark the time thus precisely because it perhaps adds a touch of interest to the consideration of what happened between then and Friday night, when McGibbon first saw what he had done. Of the importance of the blow in Henry's life there is no doubt. It turned him sharply Not until he was approaching middle life could he look back on the occasion without wincing. And while wincing, he would say that it was what he had needed. Plainly. That it made a man of him, or started the process.
As to that, I can't say. Perhaps it did. Life is not so simple as Henry had been taught it was. I am fatalist enough to believe that Henry would have become what he was to become in any event, because it was in him. I doubt if he could have been given any other direction. Though of course he might have gone under simply through a failure to get aroused. Something had to start him, of course.
The practical difficulty with Henry's life was, of course, that he was strong. He didn't know this himself. He thought he was weak. Some who observed him thought the same. There were reasons enough. But Mildred always declared flatly that he was a genius, that he was too good for Sunbury, against the smugness of which community she was inclined to rail. A debate on this point between Mrs Henderson and, say, William F. Donovan, the drug store man, would have been interesting. Mr Donovan's judgments of human character were those of Simpson Street.
I say Henry was strong, because I can't interpret his rugged nonconformity in any other way. A weaker lad would long since have given up, gone into Smith Brothers' wholesale, taken his spiritual beating and fallen into step with his generation. But Henry's resistance was so strong and so deep that he didn't even know he was resisting. He was doing the only thing he could do, being what he was, feeling what he felt. And when instinct failed to guide, when 'the Power' lay quiescent, he was simply waiting and blundering along; but never falling into step. He had to wait until the Power should rise with him and take him out and up where he belonged.
There was a little scene the Monday evening before.
It was in the rooms. Mildred was there.
Henry stumbled in on the two of them, Mildred and Humphrey. They were at the piano, seated side by side. They had been studying Tristan and Isolde together for a week or so; Mildred playing out the motifs. She often played the love duet from the second act for him, too. Henry heard him, mornings, trying to hum it while he shaved.
They insisted that he take a chair. He, with a sense of intrusion, took the arm of one, and kept hat and stick (his thin bamboo) in his hands.
Mildred said reflectively:—
'Corinne writes that she'll be back for a week late in August.' Then, noting the touch of dismay on Henry's ingenuous countenance, she added, 'But you mustn't have her on your conscience, Henry.'
'It isn't that——'
'I'm fond of Corinne. But I can see now that you two would never get on long together. In a queer way you're too much alike. At least, you both have positive qualities. Corinne will some day find a nice little husband who'll look after the business side of her concerts. And you—well, Henry, you've got to have some one to mother you.' She smiled at him thoughtfully. 'Some one you can make a lot of.'
'No.' Henry's colour was up. He was shaking his head. 'You don't understand. I'm through with girls. They're nothing in my life. Nothing!'
She slowly shook her head. 'That's absurd, Henry. You're particularly the kind. You'll never be able to live without idealising some woman.'
'I tell you they're nothing to me. My life is different now. I've changed. I've put money—a lot of money—into the Gleaner. It means big responsibilities. You've no idea——'
'If I hadn't, seen you writing,' she mused aloud.... 'No, Henry. You won't change. You'll grow, but you won't change. You're going to write, Henry. And you'll always write straight at a woman.'
'No! No!' Henry was sputtering. He appeared to be struggling. 'Life means work to me. I'm through with——'
She took down the Tristan score from the piano and turned the pages in her lap.
'Love is the great vitaliser, Henry,' she said.
'No—it's the mind. Thinking. We have to learn to think clearly—objectively.'
'Objectively? No. Not you. And I'm glad, in a way. Because I know we're going to be proud of you. But it's love that makes the world go round. They don't teach you that in the colleges, but it's the truth... Take Wagner—and Tristan. He wrote it straight at a woman. And it's the greatest opera ever written. And the greatest love story. It's that because he was terribly in love when he wrote it. Do you Suppose, for one minute that if Wagner had never seen Mathilde Wesendonck we should have had Tristan?'
She paused, pursed her lips, studied the book with eyes that seemed to grow misty, then looked up at Humphrey.
He—tall, angular, very sober—met her gaze; then his swarthy face wrinkled up about the eyes and he hurriedly drew his cob pipe from his pocket and began filling it.
Henry stared at the rug; traced out the pattern with his stick. He couldn't answer this last point, because he had never heard of Mathilde Wesendonck. And as he was supposed to be 'musical' it seemed best to keep quiet.
He made an excuse of some sort and went out for a walk. Down by the lake he thought of several strong arguments. Mildred was wrong. She had to be wrong. For he had cut girls out.
It was like Mildred to speak out in that curiously direct way. She was fond of Henry. And she had divined, out of her various, probably rather vivid contacts with life, certain half-truths that were not accepted in Sunbury.
I think she saw Henry pretty clearly, saw that he was driven by an emotional dynamo that was to bring him suffering and success both.... Mildred, of course, never really belonged in a small town.
It was at the close of the following afternoon that Henry came in and found Humphrey's long figure stretched out on the window-seat—he was smoking, of course—of all things, blowing endless rings up at the curtains Mildred had made and hung for him. His dark skin looked gray. There were deep lines in his face. He couldn't speak at first. But he stared at Henry.
That young man put away hat and stick, had his coat off, and was rolling back his shirt sleeves for a wash, humming the refrain of Kentucky Babe. Then, through a slow moment, the queer silence about him, Humphrey's attitude—that fact, for that matter, that Hump was here, at all; he was a great hand to work until six or after at the Voice office—these things worked in on him like a premonition. The little song died out. He went on, a few steps, toward the bathroom, then came to a stop, turned toward the silent figure on the window-seat, came slowly over.
Now he saw his friend clearly. As he sank on the arm of a chair—it was where he had sat the evening before—he caught his breath.
'Wha—what is it?' he asked. His voice was suddenly husky. His mind went blank. There was sensation among the roots of his hair. 'What's the matter, Hump?'
Finally Humphrey took out his pipe and spoke. His voice, too, was low and uncertain. But he gathered control of it as he went on.
'Where've you been?' he asked.
'Me? Why, over at Rockwell Park. Bob McGibbon wanted me to see about a regular correspondent for the “Rockwell Park Doings.”'
'Heard anything?'
'Me? No. Why?... Hump, what is it? What you getting at?'
'Then I've got to tell you.' He swung his feet around; sat up; emptied his pipe, then filled it.
'Is it—is it—about me, Hump?'
'Yes. It is.'
'Well—then—hadn't you better tell me?'
'I'm trying to, Hen. It's dam' unpleasant. You remember—you told me once—early in the summer—' Humphrey, usually most direct, was having difficulty in getting it out—'you told me you rode a tandem up to Hoffmann's Garden with that little Wilcox girl.'
'Oh, that! That was nothing. Why all the time I lived at Mrs Wilcox's I never——'
'Yes, I know. Let me try to tell this, Hen. It's hard enough. She's in a scrape. That girl. There's a big row on. I'm not going into the details, so far as I've heard 'em. There ugly. They wouldn't help. But her mother's collapsed. Her uncle and aunt have turned up and taken the girl off somewhere. He's a butcher on the North Side.' Henry was pale but attentive.
'In all the time I lived there,' he began again...
'Please, Hen! Wait! It is one of those mean scandals that tear up a town like this every now and then. Boils up through the crust and has to be noticed. It's a beastly thing. The number of men involved... some older ones... and young Bancroft Widdicombe has left town. There's some queer talk about her marrying him. And they say one or two others have run away. Widdicombe got out before the storm broke. Jim Smith says he's been heard from at San Francisco.'
'But they can't say of me——'
'Hen, they can and they do.'
'But I can prove——'
'What can you prove? What chance will you have to prove anything? You were disturbed when Martha Caldwell and the party with Charles H. Merchant caught you with her up at Hoffmann's——'
'But, Hump, I didn't want to take her out that night! And it's the only time I ever really talked to her except once or twice in the boarding-house.'
He was speaking with less energy now. He felt the blow. Not as he would feel it a few hours later; but he felt it.
Humphrey watched him.
'It has brought things home to me,' he said uncertainly. 'The sort of thing that can happen. When you're caught in a drift, you don't think, of course... Now, Hen, listen! This is real trouble. It's going to hit you about to-morrow—full force. It's got to be faced. I don't want to think that you'd run——'
'Oh, no,' Henry put in mechanically, 'I won't run.'
'I'm sure you won't. But it's got to be faced. You're hit especially.'
'But why, when I——'
'Because you lived alone there, in the boarding-house, for two years. And you were caught with her at Hoffmann's, she in bloomers, drinking beer. Just a cheap little tough. And there isn't a thing you can do but live it down. Nobody will say a direct word to you.'
'That's what I'll do,' said Henry, 'live it down.'
'It'll be hard, Hen.'
Henry sighed. 'I've faced hard things, Hump.'
'Yes, you have, in a way.'
'I'll wash up. Where we going to eat? Stanley's?'
'I suppose. I don't feel like eating much.'
It was not until they had started out that Henry gave signs of a deeper reaction.
On the outer doorstep he stood motionless.
'Coming along?' asked Humphrey, trying to hide his anxiety.
'Why—yes. In a minute... Say, Hump, do you suppose they'll—you know, I ain't afraid'—an uprush of feeling coloured his voice, brought a shake to it—'I don't know. Perhaps I am afraid. All those people—you know, at Stanley's...'
Humphrey did an unusual thing; laid his hand on Henry's shoulder affectionately; then took his arm and led him along the alley, saying:—
'We'll go down to the lunch counter. It's just as well, Hen. Better get sure of yourself first.'
He wondered, as they walked rapidly on—Henry had a tendency to walk fast and faster when brooding or excited—whether the boy would ever get sure of himself. There were queer, bitter, profoundly confusing thoughts in his own mind, and an emotional tension, but back of all this, coming through it and softening him, his feeling for Henry. It was something of an elder brother's feeling, I think. Henry seemed very young. It was wicked that he had to suffer with all those cynical older men. It might mark the boy for life. Such things happened.
He decided to watch him closely. Sooner or later the thing would hit him full. He would have to be protected then. Even from himself, perhaps. In a way it oughtn't to be worse for him than it had been after the Hoffmann's Garden incident.
But it was worse. The other had been, after all, no more than an incident. This, now, was an overpowering fact. The town didn't have to notice the other. And despite the gossiping instinct, your small community is rather glad to edge away from unpleasant surmises that are not established facts. Facts are so uncompromising. And so disrupting. And sometimes upsetting to standardised thought.
'That's it,' thought Humphrey—he was reduced to thought Henry was striding on in white silence—'it's a fact. They can't evade it. Only thing they can do, if they're to keep comfortable about their dam' town, is to kill everybody connected with the mess. Have to revise party and dinner lists. And it'll raise Ned with the golf tournament. They'll resent all that. And they'll have to show outsiders that the thing is an amazing exception. Nothing else going on like it. They'll have to show that.'
3
The next morning Henry—stiff, distrait, his eyes wandering a little now and then and his sensitive mouth twitching nervously—breakfasted with Humphrey at Stanley's.
People—some people—spoke to him. But he winced at every greeting. Humphrey watched him narrowly. He was ablaze with self-consciousness. But he held his head up pretty well.
He was all shut up within himself. Since their talk of the evening he hadn't mentioned the subject. It was clear that he couldn't mention it. He spoke of curiously irrelevant things. The style of Robert Louis Stevenson, for one. During the walk from the rooms to Stanley's. And then he brought up Bob McGibbon's theory that even with a country weekly, if you made your paper interesting enough you would get readers and the readers would bring the advertising He asked if Humphrey thought it would work out. 'It's important to me, you know, Hump. I've got a cool thousand up on the Gleaner. It's like betting on Bob McGibbon's idea to win.' His voice trembled a little. There were volcanoes of feeling stirring within the boy. He would erupt of course, sooner or later. Humphrey found the experience moving to the point of pain.
When he entered the Gleaner office, Bob McGibbon, looking up at him anxiously, said good-morning, then pursed his lips in thought.
He found occasion to say, later:—
'Henry, how are you taking this thing?'
Henry swallowed, glanced out of the window, then threw out one hand with an expressive gesture and raised his eyes.
'Oh,' he said, 'all right. I—it's not true, Bob. Not about me.'
'That's just what I tell 'em,' said McGibbon eagerly. 'What you going to do? Go right on?'
'Well—why, yes! I can't run away.'
'Of course not. These things are mean. In a small town. Hypocrisy all round. I was thinking it over this morning, and it occurred to me you might like to get off by yourself and do some real writing for the paper. That's what we need, you know. Sketches. Snappy poetry. Little pictures of life-like George Ade's stuff in the Record. Or a bit of the 'Gene Field touch. Something they'd have to read. Make the Gleaner known. Put it on every centre table in Sunbury. That's what we really need from you, you know. Your own stuff, not ours. Take this reception to-night at the Jenkins'. Anybody can cover that. I'll go myself.'
Henry, pale, lips compressed, shook his head.
'No,' said he, after a pause, 'I'll cover it.'
McGibbon considered this, then moved irresolutely back to his desk. Here, for a time, he sat, with knit brows, and stabbed at flies with his pen.
It would be walking into the lion's den, that was all. He wished he could think of a way to hold the boy back. There were complications. The Gleaner, just, lately, had been going pretty violently after what McGibbon called the 'Old Cinch.' Without quite enough evidence, they were now virtually accusing Waterhouse of embezzlement, and the others of connivance. Mr Weston was among the most respected in Sunbury, rich, solid, a supporter of all good things'. Though Boice and Waterhouse were unknown to local society, the Westons were intimate with the Jenkinses and their crowd. They all regarded the Gleaner as a scurrilous, libellous sheet, and McGibbon himself as an intruder in the village life. And there was another trouble; very recent. He couldn't speak of it with the boy in this state of mind. Not at the moment. He couldn't see his way... And now, with the realest-scandal Sunbury had known in a decade piled freshly on the paper's bad name. But he couldn't think of a way to keep him from going. The boy was, in a way, his partner. There were little delicacies between them.
Henry went.
The reception given by Mr and Mrs Jenkins to Senator and Madame William M. Watt, was the most important social event of the summer.
The Jenkins's home, a square mansion of yellow brick, blazed with light at every window. Japanese lanterns were festooned from tree to tree about the lawn. An awning had been erected all the way from the front steps to the horse block, and a man in livery stood out there assisting the ladies from their carriages. It was felt by some, it was even remarked in undertones, that the Jenkinses were spreading it on pretty thick, even considering that it was the first really public appearance of the Watts in Sunbury.
The Senator was known principally as titular sponsor for the Watt Currency Act, of fifteen years back... In those days his fame had overspread the boundaries of his own eastern state clear to California and the Mexican border. Older readers will recall that the Watt Bill nearly split a nation in its day. After his defeat for re-election, in the earlier nineties, he had slipped quietly into the obscurity in which he regained until his rather surprising marriage with the very rich, extremely vigorous American woman from abroad who called herself the Comtesse de la Plaine. At the time of his disappearance from public life various reasons had been dwelt on. One was drink. His complexion—the part of it not covered by his white beard—might have been regarded as corroborative evidence. But it was generally understood that he was 'all right' now; a meek enough little man, well past seventy, with an air of life-weariness and a suppressed cough that was rather disagreeable in church. His slightly unkempt beard grew a little to one side, giving his face a twisted appearance. On his occasional appearances about the streets he was always chewing an unlighted cigar. To the growing generation he was a mildly historic myth, like Thomas Buchanan or James G. Blaine.
Mrs Watt—who during her brief residence in Sunbury (they had bought the Dexter Smith place, on Hazel Avenue, in May) had somehow attached firmly to her present name the foreign-sounding prefix, 'Madame'—was a head taller than her husband, with snappy black eyes, a strongly hooked nose and an indomitable mouth. She was not beautiful, but was of commanding presence. The fact that she had lived long in France naturally raised questions. But there appeared to be no questioning either her earlier title or her wealth. If she seemed to lack a few of the refinements of a lady—it was whispered among the younger people that she swore at her servants—still, a rich countess, married to the self-effacing but indubitable author of the Watt Act, was, in the nature of things, equipped to stir Sunbury to the depths.
But the member of this interesting family with whom we are now concerned was the Madame's niece, a girl of eighteen or nineteen who had been reared, it was said, in a convent in France, then educated at a school in the eastern states, and was now living with her aunt for the first time.
Her name fell oddly on ears accustomed to the Bessies, Marys, Fannies, Marthas, Louises, Alices, and Graces of Sunbury. It was Cicely—Cicely Hamlin. It was clearly an English name. It proved, at first, difficult to pronounce, and led to joking among the younger set. The girl herself was rather foreign in appearance. Distinctly French some said. She was slimly pretty, with darkish hair and a quick, brisk, almost eager way of speaking and smiling and bobbing her hair. She used her hands, too, more than was common in Sunbury, a point for the adherents of the French theory. The quality that perhaps most attracted young and old alike was her sensitive responsiveness. Sometimes it was nearly timidity. She would listen in her eager way; then talk, all vivacity—head and hands moving, on the brink of a smile-every moment—then seem suddenly to recede a little, as if fearful that she had perhaps said too much, as if a delicate courtesy demanded that she be merely the attentive, kindly listener. She could play and be merry with the younger crowd. But she had read books that few of them had ever heard of. Plainly—though nothing so complex was plain to Henry at this period—she was a girl of delicate nervous organisation, strung a little tightly; a girl who could be stirred to almost naïve enthusiasms and who could perhaps be cruelly hurt.
Henry had seen her—once on the hotel veranda talking brightly with Mary Ames, who seemed almost stodgy beside her, once on the Chicago train, once or twice driving with Elberforce Jenkins in his high cart. The sight of her had stirred him. Already he had had to fight thoughts of her—tantalisingly indistinct mental visions—during the late night hours between staring wakefulness and sleep. And it was impossible wholly to escape bitterness over the thought that he hadn't met her. He oughtn't to care. He couldn't admit to himself that it mattered. A couple of years back, in his big days, they would have met all right. First thing. Everybody would have seen to it. They would have told her about him. Now... oh well!
He stood in the shadow, out by the carriage entrance, pulling at his moustache. There had been a sort of rushing of the spirit, almost a fervour, in his first determination to face the town bravely. Now for the first time he began to see that the thing couldn't be rushed at. It might take years to build up a new good name—years of slights and sneers, of dull hours and slack nerves. For Henry did know that emotional climaxes pass.
He chose a time, between carriages, when the sheltered walk was empty, to move up toward the house. Everybody here was dressed up—'Wearing everything they've got!' he muttered. He himself had on his blue suit and straw hat and carried his bamboo stick. A thick wad of copy paper protruded from a side pocket. A vest pocket bulged with newly sharpened pencils. It had seemed best not to dress. He wasn't a guest; just the representative of a country weekly.
By the front steps there were arched openings in the canvas. Up there in the light were music and rustling, continuous movement and the unearthly cackling sound that you hear when you listen with a detached mind to many chattering voices in an enclosed space. Mrs Jenkins was up there, doubtless, at the head of a reception line. He knew now, with despair in his heart, that he couldn't mount those steps. Nearly everybody there would know him. He couldn't do it.
He looked around. At one side stood a jolly little group, under the Japanese lanterns. Young people. Two detached themselves and came toward the steps. A third joined them; a girl.
'Here,' said this girl—Mary Ames's voice—'you two wait here. I'll find her.'
Mary came right past him and ran up the steps. Henry drew back, very white, curiously breathless.
The other two stood close at hand. Henry wondered if he could slip away. New carriages had arrived; new people were coming up the walk. He stepped off on the grass. He found difficulty in thinking.
The girl, just across the walk, was Cicely Hamlin. The fellow was Alfred Knight. He worked in the bank; a colourless youth. He plainly didn't know what to say to this very charming new girl. He stood there, shifting his feet.
Henry thought: 'Has he heard yet? Does he know?... Does she know?'
Then Alfred's wandering eye rested on him, hailed him with relief.
'Oh, hallo. Hen;' he said. Then, after a long silence, 'Like you to meet Miss Hamlin. Mr Henry Calverly.'
Al Knight never could remember whether you said the girl's name first or the man's.
But he hadn't heard yet. Evidently. Henry sighed. Since it had to come, it would be almost better...
Miss Cicely Hamlin moved a hesitant step forward; murmured his name.
He had to step forward too.
In sheer miserable embarrassment he raised his hand a little way.
In responsive confusion she raised hers.
But his had dropped.
Hers moved downward as his came up again.
She smiled at this and extended her hand again frankly.
He took it. He didn't know that he was gripping it in a strong nervous clasp.
'I've heard of you,' she said. He liked her voice. 'You write, don't you?'
'Oh yes,' said he huskily, 'I write some.'
She didn't know.
He wondered dully who could have told her of him. It sounded like the old days. It was almost, for a moment, encouraging.
Al Knight drifted away to speak to one of the new-comers.
'Do you write stories?' she asked politely.
'I try to, sometimes. It's awfully hard.'
'Oh yes, I know.'
'Do you write?'
'Why—oh no! But I've wished I could. I've tried a little.'
So far as words went they might as well have been mentioning the weather. It was not an occasion in which words had any real part. He saw, felt, the presence of a girl unlike any he had known—slimly pretty, alive with a quick eager interest, and subtly friendly. She saw, and felt, a white tragic face out of which peered eyes with a gloomy fire in them.
Before Alfred Knight drifted back she asked him to call. Then, at the sight of them, Alfred drifted away again.
'Perhaps,' she added shyly, 'you'd bring some of your stories.'
'I haven't anything I could bring,' he replied, still with that burning look. 'Nothing 'that's any good. If I had...' Then this blazed from him in a low shaky voice: 'You haven't heard what they're saying about me. I can see that. If you had you wouldn't ask me to call.'
'Oh, I'm sure I would,' she murmured, greatly confused.
'You wouldn't. You really couldn't. But I want to say this—quick, before they come!'—for he saw Mary Ames in the doorway—'I've got to say it! They'll tell you something about me. Something dreadful. It isn't true. It—is—not true!'
'She isn't in there,' said Mary, joining them. Then 'Oh!' She looked at Henry with a hint of alarm in her face; said, 'How do you do!' in a voice that chilled him, brought the despair back; then said to Cicely, ignoring him: 'We'd better tell them.' And moved a step toward the group under the lanterns.
Cicely hesitated.
It was happening, right there; and in the cruellest manner. Henry couldn't speak. He felt as if a fire were burning in his brain.
Al Knight, seeing Mary, drifted back.
The group, over yonder, was breaking up. Or coming this way.
Another moment and Elberforce Jenkins—tall, really good-looking in his perfect-fitting evening clothes—stood before them.
He glanced at Henry. Gave him the cut direct.
'All right,' said Elbow Jenkins, addressing Cicely now, 'we'll go without her. She won't mind.'
Still Cicely hesitated. For a moment, standing there, lips parted a little, looking from one to another. Then, with an air of shyness, apparently still confused, she gave Henry her hand.
'Do come,' she said, with a quick little smile. 'And bring the stories. I'm sure I'd like them.'
She went with them, then.
Henry stared after her with wet eyes. Then for a while he wandered alone among the trees. His thoughts, like his pulse, were racing uncontrollably.
It is to be noted that he returned a while later, faced Mrs Jenkins, wrote down the names of all the guests he recognised, and walked, very fast, with a stiff dignity, lips compressed, eyes and brain still burning, down to the Gleaner office.
5
The story had to be written. Not at the rooms, though; Mildred might be there with Humphrey. Sometimes he worked at the Y.M.C.A.
But there was a light in the windows of the Gleaner office, over Hemple's.
McGibbon was up there, bent over his desk in his shirtsleeves, a hand sprawling through his straight ragged hair.
Henry acknowledged his partner's greeting with a grunt; dropped down at his own desk; plunged at the story.
McGibbon looked up once or twice, saw that Henry was unaware of him; continued his own work. His thin face looked worn. He bit his lip a good deal.
'There,' said Henry, finally, with a grim look—'there's the reception story.'
'Oh, all right.' McGibbon came over; took the pencilled script; then sat on the edge of the table beside Henry's desk.
'Haven't got some good filler stuff?' he queried wearily, brushing a hand across his forehead. 'We're going to have a lot of extra space this week.'
He watched Henry, to see if this remark had an effect. It had none. He nibbed his hand slowly back and forth across his forehead.
'The fact is,' he remarked, 'they've landed on us. Pretty hard. The advertisers. Just about all Simpson Street. It's a sort of boycott, apparently. Takes out two-thirds of our advertising. And Weston called my note—that two hundred and forty-eight—for paper. Simply charged it up against our account. Pretty dam' high-handed, I call it!'
His voice was rising. He sprang up, paced the floor.
'They're showing fight,' he ran on. 'We've got to lick 'em. That's my way—start at the drop of the hat. What's a little advertising! Get readers—that's the real trick of it. We'll lick 'em with circulation, that's what we'll do!'
He stood over Henry's desk; even pounded it. The boy didn't seem to get it, even now. He was hardly listening. With his own money at stake. But McGibbon was finding him like that; queer gaps on the practical side. No money sense whatever!
'Henry,' he was crying now, 'it's up to you. You're a genius. It's sheer waste to use you on fool receptions. Write, man! WRITE! Let yourself go. Anything—sketches, verse, stories! Let's give 'em what they don't look for in a country paper. Like the old Burlington Hawkeye and that fellow Brann. And the paper in Lahore that nobody would ever have heard of if Kipling hadn't written prose and verse to fill in, here and there. He was a kid, too. There's always, somewhere, a little paper that's famous because a man can write. Why shouldn't it be us! Us! Right up here over the meat-market. Why, we can make the little old Gleaner known from coast to coast. We can put Sunbury on the map. Just with your pen, my boy! With your pen! And then where'll old Weston be! Where'll these little two-bit advertisers be!'
He spread his thin hands in a gesture of triumph. Henry looked up now; slowly pushed back his chair; said, in a weak voice, 'I'm tired. Guess I'd better get along;' and walked out.
McGibbon stared after him, his mouth literally open.
6
Back of the old Parmenter place the barn was dark. Henry felt relief. He was tingling with excitement. He couldn't move slowly. His fists were clenched. Every nerve in his body was strung tight.
He was thinking hopelessly, 'I must relax.'
He crept through the dim shop, among Humphrey's lathes, belts, benches of tools, big kites and rows of steel wheels mounted in frames. There were large planes, too, parts of the gliders Humphrey had been puttering with for a long time. Three years, he had once said.
Henry lingered on the stairs and looked about the ghostly rooms. Beams of moonlight came in through the windows and touched this and that machine. He felt himself attuned to all the trouble, the disaster, in the universe. Life was a tragic disappointment. Nothing ever came right. People didn't succeed; they struggled and struggled to breast a mighty, tireless current that swept them ever backward.
Poor old Hump! He had put money into this shop. All the little he had; or nearly all. And into the technical library that lined his bedroom walls upstairs. His daily work at the Voice office was just a grind, to keep body and soul together while the experiments were working out. Hump was patient.
'Until I moved in here,' Henry thought, with a disturbingly passive sort of' bitterness, 'and brought girls and things. He doesn't have his nights and Sundays for work any more. Hump could do big things, too.'
He went on up the stairs and switched on the lights in the living-room.
He caught sight of his face in a mirror. It was white.
There was a look of strain about the eyes. The little moustache, turned up at the ends, mocked him.
'I'll shave it off,' he said aloud.
He even got out his razor and began nervously stropping it.
He was alarmed to discover that his control of his hands was none too good. They moved more quickly than he meant them to, and in jerks.
Too, the notion of shaving his moustache struck him weakness, an impulse to be resisted. Too much like retreating. Subtly like that.
He put the razor back in its drawer.
In the centre of the living-room rug, standing there, stiffly, he said:—
'I'll face them. I'll go down fighting. They shan't say I surrendered.'
He walked round and round the room.
He had never in his life felt anything like this jerky nervousness. A restlessness that wouldn't permit him so much as to sit down.
While in the Gleaner office he had hardly been aware of McGibbon. He certainly hadn't listened to him.
But now, like a blow, everything McGibbon had said came to him. Every syllable. Suddenly he could see the man, towering ever him, pounding his desk. Talking—talking—full of fresh hopes while the world crumbled around him. More disaster! It was the buzzing song of the old globe as it spun endlessly on its axis. Disaster!... The advertisers had at last combined against the paper. Old Weston had called McGibbon's note. That must have taken about the last of Henry's thousand. They were broke.
His hand brushed his coat pocket. It bulged with copy paper. He must have thrust it back there absently, at the office.
He drew it out and gazed at it.
It was curious; he seemed to see it as a printed page, with a title at the top, and his name. He couldn't see what the title was. Yet it was there, and it was good.
His restlessness grew. Again he walked round and round the room. There was a glow in his breast. Something that burned and fired his nerves and drove him as one is driven in a dream. Either he must rush outdoors and wander at a feverish pace around the town and up the lake shore—walk all night—or he must sit down and write.
He sat down. Picked up an atlas of Humphrey's and wrote on his lap. And he wrote, from the beginning, as he would have walked had he gone out, in a fever of energy, gripping the pencil tightly, holding his knees up a little, heels off the floor. The colour reappeared about his forehead and temples, then on his cheeks.
When Humphrey came in, after midnight, he was in just this posture, writing at a desperate rate. The floor all about him was strewn with sheets of paper. One or two had drifted off to the centre of the room. He didn't hear his friend come up the stairs.' When he saw him, standing, looking down, something puzzled, he cried out excitedly':—
'Don't Hump!'
Humphrey resisted the impulse to reply with a 'Don't what?'
'Go on! Don't disturb me!'
'You seem to be hitting it up.'
'I am. I can't talk! Please—go away! Go to bed. You'll make me lose it!'
Humphrey obeyed.
Later—well along in the night—he awoke.
There was a crack of light about his door. He turned on his own light. It was quarter to three.
'Here!' he called. 'What on earth are you up to, Hen?' A chair scraped. Then Henry came to the door and burst it open. His coat was off now, and his vest open. He had unbuttoned his collar in front so that the two ends and the ends of his tie hung down. His hair was straggling down over his forehead.
'Do you know what time it is, Hen?'
'No. Say—listen to this! Just a few sentences. You liked the piece I did about the Business Men's Picnic, remember. Well, this has sorta grown out of it. It's just the plain folks along Simpson Street. Say! There's a title for the book.'
'For the what!'
'The book. Oh, there'll be a lot of them. Sorta sketches. Or maybe they're stories. I can't tell yet. Plain folks of Simpson Street. Yes, that's good. Wait a second, while I write it down. The thing struck me all at once—to-night!—Queer, isn't it!—thinking about the folks along the street—Bill Hemple, and Jim Smith in your press room with the tattooed arms, and old Boice and Charlie Waterhouse, and the way Bob McGibbon blew into town with a big dream, and the barber shop—Schultz and Schwartz's—and Donovan's soda fountain, and Izzy Bloom and the trouble about his boys in the high school, and all his fires, and Mr Draine, the Y.M.C.A. secretary that's been in the British Mounted Police in Mashonaland—think of it! In Africa—and——'
'Would you mind'—Humphrey was on an elbow, blinking sleepy eyes—'would you mind talking a little more slowly. Good lord! I can't——'
'All right, Hump. Only I'm excited, sorta. You see, it just struck me that there's as much romance right here on Simpson Street as there is in Kipling's Hills or Bagdad or Paris. Just the way people's lives go. And what old Berger's really thinking about when he tells you the vegetables were picked yesterday.'
Humphrey gazed—wider awake now—at the wild figure before him. And a thrill stirred his heart. This boy was supposed to be crushed.
'How much have you done?' he asked soberly.
'Most finished this first one. It's about old Boice and Charlie Waterhouse and Mr Weston——'
'Gee!' said Humphrey.
'I call it, The Caliph of Simpson Street.'
'Well—see here, you're going to bed, aren't you?'
'Oh, yes. But listen.' And he began reading aloud.
Humphrey waved his arms.
'No, no! For heaven's sake, go to bed, Hen!'
'Well, but—oh, say! Just thought of something!' And he went out, chuckling.
Humphrey awoke again at eight. Through his open door came a light that was not altogether of the sun.
The incident of the earlier morning came to him in confused form, like a dream.
He sprang out of bed.
There, still bending over the atlas, was Henry. The sheets of paper lay like drifts of snow about him now. His pencil was flying.
He looked up. His face was white and red in spots now. He was grinning, apparently out of sheer happiness.
'Say,' he cried, 'listen to this! It's one I call, The Cauliflowers of the Caliph. Oh, by the way, I've changed the title of the book to Satraps of the Simple.
'The whole book'll be sort of imaginary, like that. It's queer. Just as if it came to be out of the air. Things I never thought of in my life. Only everything I ever knew's going into it. Things I'd forgotten.'
'Hen,' said Humphrey, 'are you stark mad?'
'Me? Why—why no, Hump!' The grin was a thought sheepish now. 'But—well, Bob McGibbon said we needed stuff for the paper.'
'How many stories have you written already?'
'Just three.'
'Three! In one night!'
'But they're short, Hump. I don't believe-they average over two or three thousand words. I think they're good. You know, just the way they made me feel. Funny idea—Bagdad and Simpson Street, all mixed up together.'
'One thing's certain, Hen. You're an extremely surprising youth, but right here's where you quit. I don't propose to have a roaring maniac here in the rooms. On my hands.'
'Oh, Hump, I can't quit now! You don't understand. It's wonderful. It just comes. Like taking dictation.'
'Dictation is what you're going to take. Right now. From me. Brush up your clothes, and pick up all that mess while I dress. We'll go out for some breakfast.'
'Not now, Hump! Wait—I promise I'll go out a little later.'
'You'll go now. Get up.'
Henry obeyed. But he nearly fell back again.
'Gosh!' he murmured.
'Stiff, eh?'
'I should smile. And sorta weak.'
'No wonder. Come on, now! And I want your promise that after breakfast you'll go straight to bed.'
'Hump, I can't.'
This, apparently, was the truth. He couldn't.
He stopped in at Jackson's Book Store (formerly B. F. Jones's) and bought paper and pencils: Then, in a thrill of fresh importance, he bought penholders, large desk blotters, a flannel pen-wiper with a bronze dog seated in the centre, a cut-glass inkstand, a ruler, half a dozen pads of a better paper, a partly abridged dictionary, Roget's Thesaurus, (for years he had casually wondered what a Thesaurus was), a round glass paperweight with a gay butterfly imprisoned within, four boxes of wire clips, assorted sizes, and, because he saw it, Crabb's Synonyms. Then he saw an old copy of The Thousand and One Nights and bought that.
It seemed to him that he ought to be equipped for his work. Before he went out he asked the prices of the better makes of typewriters.
And for the first time in two years, he uttered the magic but too often fatal words:—
'Just charge it, if you don't mind.'
7
He was back at the rooms by nine-fifteen. Before the university clock boomed out the hour of noon, he had written that elusive, extraordinary little classic, A Kerbstone Barmecide, and had jotted down suggestive notes for the story that was later to be known as The Printer and the Pearls.
By this time all thoughts of civic reform had faded out. Charlie Waterhouse, now that The Caliph of Simpson Street was done and, in a surface sense, forgotten, no longer appeared to him as a crook who should be ousted from the local political triumvirate and from town office; he was but a bit of ore in the rich lode of human material with which Henry's fancy was playing. The important fact about the new Waterhouse store-and-office building in South Sunbury, was not that there was reason to believe Charlie had built it with town money but that he had put a medallion bas-relief of himself in terra cotta in the front wall.
Charlie figured, though, unquestionably, in Sinbad the Treasurer.
At noon, deciding that he would stroll out after a little and eat a bite, Henry stretched out on the lounge. Here he dozed, very lightly for an hour or two.
Humphrey stole in, found him tossing there, fully dressed, mumbling in his sleep, and stole out.
But early in the afternoon Henry leaped up. His brain, or his emotions, or whatever the source of his ideas, was a glowing, boiling, seething crater of tantalising, obscurely associated concepts and scraps of characterisation and queerly vivid, half-glimpsed dramatic moments, situations, contrasts. They amounted to a force that dragged him on. The thought that some bit might escape before he could catch it and get it written down kept his pulse racing.
At about half-past four he finished that curious fantasy, Roc's Eggs, Strictly Fresh.
This accomplishment brought a respite. He could see his book clearly now. The cover, the title page and particularly the final sentence. He knew that the concluding story was to be called The Old Man of the Street. He printed out this title; printed, too, several titles of others yet to be written—Ali Anderson and the Four Policemen and Scheherazade in a Livery Stable, and one or two more.
His next performance I find particularly interesting in retrospect. During the long two years of his extreme self-suppression in the vital matters of candy, girls, and charge-accounts, Henry had firmly refused to sing. Without a murmur he had foregone the four or five dollars a Sunday he could easily have picked up in church quartet work, the occasional sums from substituting in this or that male quartet and singing at funerals. It was even more extraordinary that he should have given up, as he did, his old habit of singing to girls. The only explanation he had ever offered of this curious stand was the rather obscure one he gave Humphrey that singing was 'too physical.' Whatever the real complex of motives, it had been a rather violent, or at least a complete reaction.
But now he strode about the room, chin up, chest expanded, brows puckered, roaring out scales and other vocalisings in his best voice. The results naturally were somewhat disappointing, after the long silence, but he kept at it.
He was still roaring, half an hour later, when McGibbon came anxiously in.
'Saw Humphrey Weaver down-town,' said the editor of the Gleaner, 'and he said I'd better look you up.'
An hour later McGibbon—red spots in his cheeks, a nervous glitter in his eyes—hurried down to the Gleaner office with the pencilled manuscripts of four of the 'Caliph' stories. He was hurrying because it seemed to him highly important to get them into type. For one thing, something might happen to them—fire, anything. For another, it might occur to Henry to sell them to an eastern magazine.
When Humphrey came in, just before six, Henry was already well into Scheherazade in a Livery Stable, and was chuckling out loud as he wrote.
Friday night was press night at the Gleaner office. Henry strolled in about ten o'clock and carelessly dropped a thick roll of script on McGibbon's desk.
That jaded editor leaned back, ran thin fingers through his tousled hair, and wearily looked over the dishevelled, yawning, exhausted, grinning youth before him. Never in his life had he seen an expression of such utter happiness on a human face.
'How many stories is this?' he asked.
'Ten.'
'Good Lord! That's a whole book!'
'No—hardly. I've thought of some more. There'll be fifteen or twenty altogether. I just thought of one, coming over here. Think I'll call it. The Story of the Man from Jerusalem. It's about the life of a little Jew storekeeper in a town like this. Struck me all of a sudden—you know, how he must feel. I don't think I'll write it to-night—just make a few notes so it won't get away from me.'
Bob McGibbon rose up, put on coat and hat, took, Henry firmly by the arm, and marched him, protesting, home.
'Now,' he said, 'you go to bed.'
'Sure, Bob! What's the matter with you! I'm just going to jot down a few notes———'
'You're going to bed!' said McGibbon.
And he stood there, earnest, even grim, until Henry was undressed and stretched out peacefully asleep.'
Henry slept until nearly three o'clock Saturday afternoon.
8
Senator Watt laid down the Gleaner, took off his glasses, removed an unlighted cigar from his mouth, and said, in his low, slightly husky voice:—
'A really remarkable piece of work. Quite worthy of Kipling.' The nineties, as we have already remarked, belong to Kipling. Outright. He had to be mentioned. 'It is fresh, vivid, and remarkably condensed. The author produces his effects with a sure swift stroke of the brush.'
The Senator rarely spoke. When he did it was always in these measured, solid sentences, as if his words might be heard round the world and therefore must be chosen with infinite care. After delivering himself of this opinion he resumed his 'dry smoke' and reached for the Evening Post, which lay folded back to the financial page.
'I was sure you would think so,' said Cicely Hamlin, glancing first at the Senator then at her aunt. 'I wish you would read it, Aunt Eleanor.'
'Hm!' remarked that formidable person, planting her own gold-rimmed glasses firmly astride her rugged nose just above the point where it bent sharply downward, picking up the paper, then lowering it to gaze with a hint of habitual, impersonal severity at her niece.
'Even so,' she said. 'Suppose the young man has gifts. That will hardly make it necessary for you to cultivate him. I gather he's a bad lot.'
'I have no intention of cultivating him,' replied Cicely, moving toward the door, but pausing by the mantel to pat her dark ample hair into place. She wore it low on her shapely neck. Cicely was wearing a simple-appearing, far from inexpensive blue frock.
Madame Watt read the opening sentence of The Caliph of Simpson Street, then lowered the paper again.
'Are you going out, Cicely?'
'No, I expect company here.'
'Who is coming?'
The girl compressed her lips for an instant, then:—
'Elberforce Jenkins.'
'Hm!' said Madame, and raised the paper.
An electric bell rang.
Cicely came back into the room; stood by a large bowl of roses; considered them.
The butler passed through the wide hall. A voice sounded in the distance. The butler appeared.
'Mr Henry Calverly calling,' he said.
Madame Watt raised her head so abruptly that her glasses fell, brought up with a jerk at the end of a thin gold chain, and swung there.
Cicely stood motionless by the roses.
The Senator glanced up, then shifted his cigar and resumed his study of the financial page.
'You will hardly——' began Madame.
'Show him into the drawing-room,' said Cicely with dignity.
The butler wavered.
Then, as if to settle all such small difficulties, Henry himself appeared behind him, smiling naively, eagerly.
Cicely hurried forward. Her quick smile came, and the little bob of her head.
'How do you do?' she said brightly. 'Mr Calverly—my aunt, Madame Watt! And my uncle, Senator Watt!'
Madame Watt arose, deliberately, not without a solid sort of majesty. She was a presence; no other such ever appeared in Sunbury. She fixed an uncompromising gaze on Henry.
So uncompromising was it that Cicely covered her embarrassment by moving hurriedly toward the drawingroom, with a quick:—
'Come right in here.'
There was no one living on this erratic earth who could have cowed Henry on this Saturday evening. A week later, yes. But not to-night. He never even suspected that Madame meant to cow him. In such moments as these (and there were a good many of them in his life) Henry was incapable of perceiving hostility toward himself. The disaster that on Tuesday had seemed the end of the world was to-night a hazy memory of another epoch. There were few grown or half-grown persons in Sunbury that were not thinking on this evening of the meanest scandal in the known history of the town and, incidentally, among others involved, of Henry Calverly; but Henry himself was of those few.
He marched straight on Madame with cordial smile and outstretched hand. He wrung the hand of the impassive Senator.
That worthy said, now:—
'I have just read this first of your new series of sketches. Allow me to tell you that I think it admirable. In the briefest possible compass you have pictured a whole community in its petty relationships, at once tragic and comic. There is caustic satire in this sketch, yet I find deep human sympathy as well. It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance.'
When, after a rather amazing outpouring of words—the thing didn't amount to much; just a rough draft really; he hoped they'd like the next one; it was about cauliflowers—he had disappeared into the front room, the Senator remarked:—
'The young man makes an excellent impression.'
'The young man,' remarked Madame, 'is all right.'
Half an hour later the noise of the front door opening, and a voice, caused the two young people to start up out of a breathless absorption in the story called A Kerbstone Barmecide, which Henry was reading from long strips of galley proof. He had already finished The Cauliflowers of the Caliph.
For a moment Cicely's face went blank.
The butler announced:—
'Mr Jenkins calling, Miss Cicely.'
The one who was not equal to the situation was Elbow. He stood in the doorway, staring.
Cicely was only a moment late with her smile.
Henry, with an open sigh of regret, nodded at his old acquaintance and folded up the long strips of galley proof.
Elbow came into the room now, and took Cicely's hand. But his small talk had gone with his wits. He barely returned Henry's nod. Cicely, nervously active, suggested a chair, asked if there was going to be a Country Club dance this week, thanked him for the beautiful roses.
Then silence fell upon them; an awkward silence, that seemed to announce when it set in its intention of making itself increasingly awkward and very, very long. It was confirmed as a hopeless silence by the sudden little catchings of breath, the slight leaning forward, followed by nothing at all—first on the part of Cicely, then of Elbow.
Henry sat still.
Once he raised his eyes. They met squarely the eyes of Elbow. For a long moment each held the gaze. It was war.
Cicely said now, greatly confused:—
'I know that you sing, Mr Calverly. Please do sing something.'
There, now, was an idea! It appealed warmly to Henry. He went straight to the piano, twisted up the stool, struck his three chords in turn, and plunged into that old song of Samuel's Lover's that has quaint charm when delivered with spirit and humour, Kitty of Coleraine.
After which he sang, Rory O'More. He had spirit and humour aplenty to-night.
The Senator came quietly in, bowed to Elbow, and asked for The Low-Back Car.
Elbow left.
'Why did you tell me you hadn't any stories you could bring?' Cicely asked, a touch of indignation in her voice.
'It was so. I didn't.'
'You had these.'
'No. I didn't. That's just it!'
'But you don't mean——'
'Yes! Just since I met you!'
'Ten stories, you said. It seems—I can't——'
'But it's true. Three days. And nights, of course. I've been so excited!'
'I never heard of such a thing! Though, of course, Stevenson wrote Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in three days. But ten different stories.'... She sat quiet, her hands folded in her lap, very thoughtful, flatteringly thoughtful. 'It sounds a little like magic.'
She was delicately pretty, sitting so still in her big chair.
'I wrote them straight at you,' he said, low, earnest. 'Every word.'
Even Henry caught the extreme emphasis of this, and hurried to elaborate.
'You see I was just sick Tuesday night. Everything had gone wrong with me. And then that horrible story that wasn't true. I knew I shouldn't have spoken of it to you, but—well, it was just driving me crazy, and I couldn't bear to think you might despise me like the others without ever knowing the truth. And... You see I must have felt the inspiration you... Even then, I mean...'
He was red. He seemed to be getting himself out of breath. And he was tugging at the roll of proofs in his pocket.
'Shall I—finish—this?'
'Oh, yes!' She sank into a great leather chair; looked up at him with glowing eyes. 'I want you to read me all of them. Please!'
She said it almost shyly.
Henry drew up a chair, found his place, and read on. And on. And on.
It was victory.