Samuel Merwin - Henry Is Twenty - A Further Episodic History of Henry Calverly, 3rd

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

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

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

‘Surprised?’

‘Well – why, sorta.’

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

‘I don’t know as I thought anything.’

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

‘That’s what you call’em, is it?’

‘I must say you’re grand company.’

He made no reply.

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

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

‘I don’t care where we go,’ said he.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He turned on Henry with a wrinkly, comfortable grin.

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

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

‘What on earth is the matter with you!’

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

‘I’m in trouble, Humphrey.’

‘Oh, come, not so bad as all – ’

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

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

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

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

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

‘I tried to.’

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

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

‘Oh, she hung around?’

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

‘Naturally. A man’s little flirtations – ’

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

‘Well, of course – ’

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

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

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

‘Hm! you were going it!’

‘And we rode up the shore a ways.’

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

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