1
It was mid-August and twenty minutes to eight in the evening. The double rows of maples threw spreading shadows over the pavement, sidewalk and lawns of Hazel Avenue. From dim houses, set far back amid trees and shrubs, giving a homy village quality to the darkness, came through screened doors and curtained 'bay' windows the yellow glow of oil lamps and the whiter shine of electric lights. Here and there a porch light softly illuminated a group of young people; their chatter and laughter, with perhaps a snatch of song, floating pleasantly out on the soft evening air. Around on a side street, sounding faintly, a youthful banjoist with soft fingers and inadequate technique was struggling with The March Past.
Moving in a curious, rather jerky manner along the street, now walking swiftly, nervously, now hesitating, even stopping, in some shadowy spot, came a youth of twenty (going on twenty-one). He wore—though all these details were hardly distinguishable even in the patches of light at the street corners, where arc lamps sputtered whitely—neatly pressed white trousers, a 'sack' coat of blue serge, a five-dollar straw hat, silk socks of a pattern and a silken 'four-in-hand' tie. He carried a cane of thin bamboo that he whipped and flicked at the grass and rattled lightly along the occasional picket fence except when he was fussing at the light growth on his upper lip. Under his left arm was a square package that any girl of Sunbury would have recognised instantly, even in the shadows, as a two-pound box of Devoe's chocolates.
If you had chanced to be a resident of Sunbury at this period you would have known that the youth was Henry Calverly, 3rd. Though you might have had no means of knowing that he was about to 'call' on Cicely Hamlin. Or, except perhaps from his somewhat spasmodic locomotion, that he was in a state of considerable nervous excitement.
Not that Henry hadn't called on many girls in his day. He had. But he had called only once before on Cicely (the other time had been that invitation to dinner for which her aunt was really responsible) and had then, in a burning glow of temperament, read her his stories!
How he had read! And read! And read! Until midnight and after. She had been enthusiastic, too.
But he wasn't in a glow now. Certain small incidents had lately brought him to the belief that Cicely Hamlin lacked the pairing-off instinct so common among the young of Sunbury. She had been extra nice to him; true. But the fact stood that she was not 'going with' him. Not in the Sunbury sense of the phrase. A baffling, disturbing aura of impersonally pleasant feeling held him at a distance.
So he was just a young fellow setting forth, with chocolates, to call on a girl. A girl who could be extra nice to you and then go out of her way to maintain pleasant acquaintance with the others, your rivals, your enemies. Almost as if she felt she had been a little too nice and wished to strike a balance; at least he had thought of that. A girl who had been reared strangely in foreign convents; who didn't know The Spanish Cavalier or Seeing Nellie Home or Solomon Levi, yet did know, strangely, that the principal theme in Dvorak's extremely new 'New World' symphony was derived from Swing Low, Sweet Chariot (which illuminating fact had stirred Henry to buy, regardless, the complete piano score of that symphony and struggle to pick out the themes on Humphrey's piano at the rooms). A girl who had never seen De Wolf Hopper in Wang, or the Bostonians in Robin Hood, or Sothem in The Prisoner of Zenda, or Maude Adams or Ethel Barrymore or anything. A girl who had none of the direct, free and easy ways of the village young; you couldn't have started a rough-house with her—mussed her hair, or galloped her in the two-step. A girl who wasn't stuck up, or anything like that, who seemed actually shy at times, yet subtly repressed you, made you wish you could talk like the fellow's that had gone to Harvard.
In view of these rather remarkable facts I think it really was a tribute to Cicely Hamlin that the many discussions of her as a conspicuous addition to the youngest set had boiled down to the single descriptive adjective, 'tactful.' Though the characterisation seems not altogether happy; for the word, to me, connotes something of conscious skill and management—as my Crabb put it: 'TACTFUL. See Diplomatic'—and Cicely was not, certainly not in those days, a manager.
Henry, muttered softly, as he walked.
'I'll hand it to her when she comes in.
'No, she'll shake hands and it might get in the way.
'Put it on the table—that's the thing!—on a corner where she'll see it.
'Then some time when we can't think of anything to talk about, I'll say—“Thought you might like a few chocolates.” Sorta offhand. Prevent there being a lull in the conversation.
'Better begin calling her Cicely.'
'Why not? Shucks! Can't go on with “You” and “Say!” Why can't I just do it naturally? The way Herb would, or Elbow, or those fellows.
'“How'd' you do, Cicely! Come on, let's take a walk.”
'No. “Good-evening, Cicely. I thought maybe you'd like to take a walk. There's a moonrise over the lake about half-past eight.” That's better.
'Wonder if Herb'll be there. He'd hardly think to come so early, though. Be all right if I can get her away from the house by eight.'
He paused, held up his watch to the light from the corner, then rushed on.
'Maybe she'd ask me to sit him out, anyway.'
But his lips clamped shut on this. It was just the sort of thing Cicely wouldn't do. He knew it.
'What if she won't go out!'
This sudden thought brought bitterness. A snicker had run its course about town—in his eager self-absorption he had wholly forgotten—when Alfred Knight, confident in an engagement to call, had hired a horse and buggy at McAllister's. The matter of an evening drive a deux had been referred to Cicely's aunt. As a result the horse had stood hitched outside more than two hours only to be driven back to the livery, stable by the gloomy Al.
'Shucks, though! Al's a fish! Don't blame her!'
He walked stiffly in among the trees and shrubs of the old Dexter Smith place and mounted the rather imposing front steps.
That purchase of the Dexter Smith place was typical of Madame Watt at the time. She was riding high. She had money. Two acres of lawn, fine old trees, a great square house of Milwaukee brick, high spacious rooms with elaborately moulded plaster ceilings and a built-on conservatory and a barn that you could keep half a dozen carriages in! It was one of only four or five houses in Sunbury that the Voice and the Gleaner rejoiced to call 'mansions.' And it was the only one that could have been bought. The William B. Snows, like the Jenkinses and the de Casselles (I don't know if it has been explained before that the accepted local pronunciation was Dekasells,) lived in theirs. And even after the elder Dexter Smith died Mrs Smith would hardly have sold the place if the children hadn't nagged her into it. Young Dex wanted to go to New York. And at that it was understood that Madame Watt paid two prices.