Henry Is Twenty: A Further Episodic History of Henry Calverly, 3rd

by Samuel Merwin

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.'