Kitabı oku: «Henry Is Twenty: A Further Episodic History of Henry Calverly, 3rd», sayfa 9

6

A faint light was creeping over the bowl-like sky. And a fainter colour was spreading upward from the eastern horizon. The thousands of night stars had disappeared, leaving only one, the great star of the morning. It sent out little points of light, like the Star of the East in Sunday school pictures. It seemed to stir with white incandescence.

Henry straightened up; gently placed Corinne against the breakwater; covered his face.

She considered him from under lowered eyelids. Her face was expressionless. She didn’t smile. And she wasn’t singing now. She smoothed out her skirt, rather deliberately and thoughtfully.

‘Think of it!’ Henry broke out with a shudder. ‘It’s a dreadful thing that’s happened!’

‘It might be,’ said Corinne very quietly, ‘if Arthur didn’t have the sense to take that train.’

‘And we’re sitting here as if – ’

‘Listen! What on earth made you go back to the house?’

‘I can’t tell you. I don’t know. I had to.’

‘Hm! You certainly did it. You’re not lacking courage, Henry.’

He said nothing to this. He didn’t feel brave.

‘Mildred was foolish. She shouldn’t have let herself get so stirred up. She ought to have gone back.’

‘How can you say that! Don’t you see that she couldn’t!’

‘Yes, I saw that she couldn’t. But it was a mistake.’ Henry was up on his knees, now, digging sand and throwing it.

‘It was love,’ he said hotly – ‘real love.’

‘It’s a wreck,’ said she.

‘It can’t be. If they love each other!’

‘This town won’t care how much they love each other. And there are other things. Money.’

‘Bah! What’s money!’

‘It’s a lot. You’ve got to have it.’

‘Haven’t you any ideals, Corinne?’

She reflected. Then said, ‘Of course.’ And added: ‘She had Arthur where she wanted him. That’s why he went away, of course. He thought she’d caught him. Now she’s lost her head and let him get away. Dished everything. No telling what he’ll do when he finds out.’

‘He mustn’t find out.’ Henry was not aware of any inconsistency within himself.

‘He will if she’s going to lose her head like this. There are some things you have to stand in this world. One of the things Mildred had to stand was a husband.’

‘But how could she go back to him – to-night – feeling this way?’

‘She should have.’

‘You’re cynical.’

‘I’m practical. Do you want her to go through a divorce, and then marry Humphrey? That’ll take money. It’s a luxury. For rich folks.’

‘Don’t say such things, Corinne!’

‘Why not. She’s made the break with Arthur. Now the next thing’s got to happen. What’s it to be?’

Henry got to his feet. He gazed a long time at the morning star.

The university clock struck three.

Henry shivered..

‘Come,’ he said. ‘Let’s get back.’ It didn’t occur to him to help her up.

The four of them lingered a few moments at Mildred’s door. Humphrey finally led Mildred in. For a last goodnight, plainly.

Corinne smiled at Henry. It was an odd, slightly twisted smile.

‘After all,’ she murmured, ‘there’s no good in taking things too seriously.’

He threw out his hands.

‘You think I’m hard,’ she said, still with that smile.

‘Don’t! Please!’

‘Well – good-night. Or good-morning.’

She gave him her hand. He took it. It gripped his firmly, lingeringly. He returned the pressure; coloured; gripped her hand hotly; moved toward her, then sprang away and dropped her hand.

‘Why – Henry!’

‘I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I was looking at that star – ’

‘I saw you looking at it.’

‘I was thinking how white it was. And bright. And so far away. As if there wasn’t any use trying to reach it. And then – oh, I don’t know – Mr Henderson made me blue, the way he looked to-night. And Humphrey and Mildred – the awful fix they’re in. And you and me – I just can’t tell you!’

‘You’re telling me plainly enough,’ she said wearily.

‘Do you ever hate, yourself?’

She didn’t answer this. Or look up.

‘Did you ever feel that you might turn out just – oh well, no good? Mr Henderson made me think that.’

‘He isn’t much good,’ said she.

‘As if your life wasn’t worth making anything out of? Your friends ashamed of you? They talk about me here now. And I haven’t been bad. Not yet. Just one or two little things.’

Her lips formed the words, in the dark, ‘You’re not bad.’

Then she said, rather sharply: ‘Don’t stand there looking like a whipped dog, Henry.’

‘I’ll go,’ he said; and turned.

‘You re the strangest person I ever knew,’ she said. ‘Maybe you are a genius. Considering that Mildred completely lost her nerve, your handling of Arthur came pretty near being it. I wonder.’

Humphrey and Mildred came out.

She came straight to him; gave him both her hands. ‘You’ve settled everything for us. Humphrey, I want to kiss Henry. I’m going to.’

Henry received the kiss like an image. Then he and Humphrey went away together into the dawn.

‘No good going to the rooms now,’ Humphrey remarked. ‘Let’s walk the beach.’

Henry nodded dismally.

7

The sky out over the lake was a luminous vault of deep rose shading off into the palest pink. The flat surface of the water, as far as they could see, was like burnished metal.

Henry flung out a trembling arm.

‘Look!’ he said huskily. ‘That star.’

It was still incandescent, still radiating its little points of light.

‘Hump,’ he said, a choke in his voice – ‘I’m shaken. I’m beginning life again to-night, to-day.’

‘I’m shaken too, Hen. The real thing has come. At last. It’s got me. It’ll be a fight, of course. But we’re going through with it. I want you to come to know her better, Hen. Even you – you don’t know. She’s wonderful. She’s going to help with my work in the shop, help me do the real things, creative work, get away from grubbing jobs.’

It was a moment of flashing insight for Henry. He couldn’t reply; couldn’t even look at his friend. His misgivings were profound. Yet the thing was done. Humphrey’s life had taken irrevocably a new course. No good even wasting regrets on it. So he fell, in a tumbling rush of emotion, to talking about himself.

‘I’m beginning again. I – I let go a little. Hump, I can’t do it. It’s too strong for me. I go to pieces. You don’t know. I’ve got to fight – all the time. Do the things I used to do – make myself work hard, hard. Keep accounts. Every penny. Leave girls alone. It means grubbing.

I can’t bear to think of it.’ He spread out his hands. ‘In some ways it seems to help to let go. You know – stirs me. Brings the Power. Makes me want to write, create things. But it’s too much like burning the candle at both ends.’

Humphrey got out his old cob pipe, and carefully scraped it.

‘That’s probably just what it is,’ he remarked.

‘Oh, Hump, what is it makes us feel this way! You know – girls, and all that.’

Humphrey lighted his pipe.

‘You don’t know how it makes me feel to see you and Mildred. Just the way she looks. And you. Corinne and I don’t look like that. We were flirting. I didn’t mean it. She didn’t, either. It’s been beastly. But still it didn’t seem beastly all the time.’

‘It wasn’t,’ said Humphrey, between puffs. ‘Don’t be too hard on yourself. And you haven’t hurt Corinne. She likes you. But just the same, she’s only flirting. She’d never give up her ambitions for you.’

‘There’s something I want to feel. Something wonderful. I’ve been thinking of it, looking at that star. I want to love like – like that. Or nothing.’

Humphrey leaned on the railing over the beach, and smoked reflectively. The rose tints were deepening into scarlet and gold. The star was fading.

‘Hen,’ said Humphrey, speaking out of a sober reverie, ‘I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anybody reach a star. Our lives, apparently, are passed right here on this earth.’

Henry couldn’t answer this. But he felt himself in opposition to it. His hands were clenched at his side.

‘I begin my life to-day,’ he thought.

But back of this’ determination, like a dark current that flowed silently but irresistibly out of the mists of time into the mists of other time, he dimly, painfully knew that life, the life of this earth, was carrying him on. And on. As if no resolution mattered very much. As if you couldn’t help yourself, really.

He set his mouth. And thrust out his chin a little. He had not read Henley’s Invictus. It would have helped him, could he have seen it just then.

‘Let’s walk,’ he said.

They breakfasted at Stanley’s.

Here there was a constant clattering of dishes and a smell of food. People drifted in and out – men who worked along Simpson Street, and a few family groups – said ‘Good-morning. Looks like a warm day.’ Picked their teeth. Paid their checks to Mrs Stanley at the front table, or had their meal tickets punched.

They walked slowly up the street as far as the Sunbury House corner, and crossed over to the Voice office. Each glanced soberly at the hotel as they passed.

They went in through the railing that divided front and rear offices. Humphrey took off his coat and dropped into his swivel chair before the roll-top desk. Henry took off his and dropped on the kitchen chair before the littered pine table. Jim Smith, the foreman, came in, his bare arms elaborately tattooed, chewing tobacco, and told ‘a new one,’ sitting on the corner of Henry’s table. Henry sat there, pale of face, toying with a pencil, and wincing.

After Jim had gone, Henry sat still, gazing at the pencil, wondering weakly if the rough stuff of life was too much for him.

He glanced over toward the desk. Humphrey, pipe in mouth, was already at work. Hump had the gift of instant concentration. Even this morning, after all that had happened, he was hard at it. Though he had something to work for.

A sob was near. Henry had to close his eyes for a moment. His sensitive lips quivered.

Humphrey would be, seeing his Mildred again at the close of the day. Henry found himself entertaining the possibility of crawling shamefacedly around to Corinne.

Then he sat up stiffly. Felt in one pocket after another until he found a little red account-book. He hadn’t made an entry for a week. Before Corinne came into his life he hadn’t missed an entry for nearly two years.

He sat staring at it, pencil in hand.

His mouth set again.

He wrote: —

‘Bkfst. Stanleys… 20c.’

He slipped the book into his pocket; compressed his lips for an instant; then reached for a wad of copy paper.

And gave a little sigh of relief. It was to be a long, perhaps an endless battle with self. But he had started.

V – TIGER, TIGER!

1

Miss Amelia Dittenhoefer was a figure in Sunbury. She had taught two generations of its young in the old Filbert Avenue school. And during more than ten years, since relinquishing that task, she had supplied the ‘Society,’ ‘Church Doings,’ ‘Woman’s Realm,’ and ‘Personal Mention’ departments of the Voice with their regular six to eight columns of news and gossip.

And as several hundred Sunbury men and women had once been her boys and girls, this sort of personal news came to her from every side. Her ‘children,’ of whatever present age, accepted her as an institution, like the university building, General Grant, or Lake Michigan. She never had a desk in the Voice office, but worked at home or moving briskly about the town. Home, to her, was the rather select, certainly high-priced boarding-house of Mrs Clark on Simpson Street, over by the lake, where she had lived, at this time, for twenty-one or twenty-two years. She was little, neat, precise, and doubtless (as I look back on those days) equipped for much more important work than any she ever found to do in Sunbury. But Woman’s sun had hardly begun to rise then.

As Henry had been, at the age of six, one of her boys, and during the past two years had shared with her the reporting work of the Voice, it was not unnatural that she should stop him as he was hurrying, airily twirling his thin bamboo stick, over to Stanley’s restaurant. It was noontime. Simpson Street was quiet. They walked along past Donovan’s drug store and Jackson’s book store (formerly B. F. Jones’s) and turned the corner. Here, in front of an unfrequented photographer’s studio, Miss Dittenhoefer stated her problem. She looked, though her trim little person was erect as always, rather beaten down.

‘Mr Boice has taken half my work, Henry – “Church Doings” and “Society.” He sent me a note. I gather that you’re to do it.’

‘Me?’ Henry spoke in honest amazement.

‘Doubtless. He’s cutting down expenses. I mind, of course, after all these years. I’ve worked very hard. And on the money side, I shall mind a little.’

‘You don’t mean – ’

‘Oh, yes. Half the former wage. And they don’t pension old teachers in Sunbury. But this is what I want to tell you – ’

‘Oh, but Miss Dittenhoefer, I don’t – ’

‘Never mind, Henry; it’s done. Of course I shouldn’t have said as much as this. Though perhaps I had to say it to somebody. Forget what you can of it. But now – I wanted to give you this list. There’s a good lot of society for summer. Never knew the old town to be so gay. Two or three things in South Sunbury that are important. They feel that we’ve been slighting them down there this year. I’ve noted everything down. And I’ve written the church societies, asking them to send announcements direct to the office after this.’

‘I don’t want your work,’ said Henry, colouring up. ‘It ain’t – isn’t – square.’

‘But it’s business, Henry. Mr. Boice explained that in his note. You’ll find I’ve written everything out in detail – all my plans and the right ladies to see. Good-bye now.’

Henry, pained, unable to believe that Miss Dittenhoefer’s day could pass so abruptly, walked moodily back to Stanley’s and, as usual, bolted his lunch. The unkindness to Miss Dittenhoefer directly affected himself. It meant still more of the routine desk-work and more running around town.

Then, slowly, as he sat there staring at the pink mosquito-bar that was gathered round the chandelier, his eyes filled. It was hard to believe that even Mr Boice could do a thing like that to Miss Dittenhoefer. Coolly cutting her pay in half! It seemed to Henry wanton cruelty. It suggested to his sensitive mind other tales of cruelty – tales of the boys who had gone into Chicago wholesale houses for their training and had found their fresh young dream-ideals harshly used in the desperate struggle of business.

Henry, I am certain, thought of Mr Boice at this moment with about as much sympathy as a native of a jungle village might feel for a man-eating tiger. That look about Miss Dittenhoefer’s mouth when she smiled! It was a world, this of placid-appearing Sunbury and the big city, just below the town line, in which men fought each other to the death, in which young boys were hardened and coarsened and taught to kill or be killed, in which women were tortured by hard masters until their souls cried out.

Boice, I am sure, sensed nothing of this somewhat morbid hostility. No; until Robert A. McGibbon turned up in Sunbury, Mr Boice had some reason to feel settled and complacent in his years. His private funds were secure in his wife’s name. And he had every reason to believe that, before many months more, it would be his privilege and pleasure to run McGibbon out of town for good. If the matter of Miss Dittenhoefer should, for a little while, stir up sentimental criticism, why – well, it was business. Sound business. And you couldn’t go back of sound business.

Henry sighed, got slowly up, had his meal ticket punched at the desk by Mrs Stanley, went back to the office.

2

The sunny, listless July day was at its lowest ebb – when men who had the time dawdled and smoked late over their lunch, when ladies took naps.

Flies crawled languidly about the speckled walls of the Voice office. Outside the screen door and the plate-glass front window, the hot air, rising from the cement sidewalk, quivered so that the yellow outlines of the Sunbury House across the street wavered unstably, and the dusty trees over there wavered, and the men sitting coatless, suspendered, in the yellow rocking chairs on the long veranda, wavered. Through the open press-room door came the sound of one small job-press rumbling at a handbill job; the other presses were still. The compositors worked or idled without talking.

Here in the office, Henry, tipped back in his kitchen chair before the inkstained, cluttered pine table by the end wall, coat off, limp wet handkerchief tucked carefully around his neck inside the collar, chewed a pencil, gazing now at the little pile of blank copy paper before him, now at a discouraged fly on the wall. Gradually the fly took on a perverse interest among his wandering, unhappy thoughts. Prompted, doubtless, by a sense of inner demoralisation that was now close to recklessness, he reached for a pen, filled it with ink, and shot a scattering volley at the slow-moving insect.

At the roll-top desk by the press-room door, Humphrey Weaver, also coatless, cob pipe in mouth, long lean face wrinkled in the effort to keep his usually docile mind on its task, elbow on desk and long fingers spread through damp hair, was correcting proof.

Mr Boice’s desk, up in the front window, outside the railing, stood vacant. The proprietor might or might not stop in on the early-afternoon trip from his house on Upper Chestnut Avenue to the post-office. Mr Boice could do as he liked. His time was his own. He lived on the labour of others. A fact which often stirred up in Henry’s breast a rage that was none the less bitter because it was impotent. It was the sort of thing, he felt, in his more nearly lucid moments, that you have to stand – the wall against which you must beat your head year after year.

Henry, victorious over the fly, settled back. He tried to work. Then sat for a time brooding. Then, finally, turned to his friend.

‘Hump,’ he said, ‘I – I know you wouldn’t think I had much to do – I mean the way you get work done – I don’t know what it is – but I wish I could see a way to begin on all this new work. I know I’m no good, but – ’

‘I wouldn’t say that.’ Humphrey, glad of a brief respite, settled back in his swivel chair. ‘I could never have written that picnic story. Never in the world. We’re different, that’s all. You’re a racer; I’m a work-horse. I don’t know just what it’s coming to. He isn’t handling you right.’

‘That’s it!’ Henry cried, softly, eagerly. ‘He isn’t!’

‘I suppose you know now about Miss Dittenhoefer.’ Henry’s head bowed in assent. ‘I didn’t have the heart to tell you myself, Hen.’ He picked up his proofs, then looked up and out of the window. ‘There,’ he remarked unexpectedly, ‘is a pretty girl!’

Henry turned with the quickness of long habit. ‘Where?’ he asked, then discovered the young person in question standing on the hotel veranda talking with Mrs B. L. Ames and Mary Ames.

She was a new girl. Even now, though Henry had given up girls for good, she caused a quickening of his pulse. She was pretty – rather slender, in a blue skirt and a trim white shirt-waist, and an unusual amount of darkish hair that massed effectively about a face, the principal characteristics of which, at this distance and through the screen door, was a bright, almost eager smile.

It is a not uninteresting fact, to those who know something of Henry’s susceptibility on previous occasions, that his gaze wandered moodily back to his table. He sighed. His hand strayed up and began pulling at his little moustache.

‘You haven’t told me what I’m to do about it, Hump. This society thing really stumps me.’

‘I haven’t known quite what to say. That’s all, Hen. The old man is riding you, of course. I didn’t think, when he raised you to twelve a week, that he’d just lie down and pay it. Meekly. Not he! He’s a crafty old duck. Very, very crafty – Cheese it; here he comes!’

The shadow of Norton P. Boice fell across the door-step. The screen door opened with a squeak, and ponderously the quietly dominating force of Simpson Street, came in, inclined his massive head in an impersonal greeting, and lowered his huge bulk into his chair.

‘Henry!’ called Mr Boice in his quietly husky voice.

The young man quivered slightly, but sat motionless.

‘Henry!’ came the husky voice again.

There could be no pretending not to hear. Henry went over there. Mr Boice sat still – he could; do that – great hands resting on his barrel-like thighs.

‘I am rearranging the work of the paper – ’ he began.

‘Yes,’ muttered Henry, not without sullenness; ‘I know.’

‘Oh, you know!’

‘Yes.’

‘There’s a little more for you to do. You’ll have to get it cleaned up well ahead of time this week. Thursday is the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Sunbury. You’ll have to cover that. Take down what you can of the speeches.’

That seemed to be all. Henry moved slowly back to the table. After a little shuffling about of the papers on his desk, Mr Boice moved heavily out and headed toward the post-office.

Then, and not before, Henry rummaged under a pile of exchanges at the rear of the table until he found a book. This he held close to his body, where it would not be seen should Humphrey turn unexpectedly.

The book was entitled Will Power and Self Mastery. Opposite the title page was a half-tone reproduction of the author – a face with a huge moustache and intensely knit brows. Henry studied it, speculating in a sort of despair as to whether he could ever bring himself to look like that. He knit his own brows. His hand strayed again to his own downy moustache.

He turned the pages. Read a sentence here and there. The book, though divided under various chapter headings, was really made up of hundreds of more or less pithy little paragraphs. These paragraphs – their substance mainly a rehandling of the work of Samuel Smiles, James Parton, and the Christian and Mental Scientists (though Henry didn’t know this) – might easily have been shuffled about and arranged in other sequence, so little continuity of thought did they represent. One paragraph ran: —

The express train of Opportunity stops but once at your station. If you miss it, it will never again matter that you almost caught it.

Another was —

Practise concentration. Fix your mind on the job in hand. Aim to do it a little better than such a job was ever done before. It is related of Thomas Alva Edison that, at the early age of seven, he —

And this: —

Oh, how many a young man, standing at the parting of life’s main roads, has lost for ever the golden opportunity because he stopped to light a cigarette!’

Henry replaced the book under the pile of exchanges. A copy of last week’s Voice lay there.

It was the first time he had let an issue of the paper go by without reading and re-reading every line of his own work. But he had, during these five days, passed through one of life’s great revolutions. Besides, he had been put on a salary basis. When on space-rates, it had been necessary to cut everything out and paste it up into a ‘string’ for measurement. It came to him now, with a warm little uprush of memory, that the best piece of writing he had ever done would be in this issue.

He opened the paper. There was his story, occupying all of page three that wasn’t given up to advertisements. This was better than working. Besides, he ought to go over it. He settled down to it.