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.