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

by Samuel Merwin

3

Humphrey was sitting there, chin on chest, long legs stretched under the desk. He didn't look up; only a slight start and a movement of one hand indicated that he heard.

Henry stood, confused, a thought alarmed, looking at him; moved aimlessly to his own desk and stirred papers about; came, finally, and sat on a corner of the exchange table, tapping his cane nervously against his knee.

'Aren't going to stay here all night, are you, Hump?' he asked, rather huskily.

Humphrey's hand moved again; he didn't speak.

'Hump! What's the matter? Anything happened?'

Still no answer.

'But you know we're picking up in advertising, Hump?'

'Not near enough.' This was a non-committal growl.

'And see the way our circulation's been——'

'Losing money on it. Can't carry it.'

'But—but, Hump——'

The senior partner waved his hand. His face was gray and grim, his voice restrained. He even smiled as he deliberately filled his pipe.

'It's bad, Hen. Very, very bad. I've tried to keep you from worrying, but you've got to know now. We paid a little over two thousand for this plant and the good will.

'Cheap enough, wasn't it?' cried Henry.

'If we'd really got her for that, yes. But look at the capital it takes. Building up. I had just a thousand more, a bond. Threw that in last month, you know.'

'Oh'—breathed Henry, fright in his eyes—'I forgot about that.'

'And you can't raise a cent.'

Henry tried to think this over. He started to speak; swallowed; slipped off the table; stood there; lifted his cane and sighted along it out the window.

'I can—November seventh,' he finally remarked.

Humphrey blew a smoke-ring; followed it with his eyes.

'My boy, nations, worlds, constellations, may crash between now and November seventh.'

'I—I could tackle my uncle again,' murmured Henry, out of a despairing face.

There was at times an acid quality in Humphrey. Henry felt it in him now, as he said dryly:—

'As I recall your last transaction with your uncle, Hen, he told you finally that you couldn't have one cent of your principal before November seventh.'

'He—well, yes, he did say that.'

'Meant it, didn't he?'

'Y—yes. He meant it.'

'He's a business man, I believe.' Humphrey smoked for a moment; then added, with that same biting quality in his voice, 'And unless he's insane he would hardly put money into this business now. As it stands—or doesn't stand. And I presume he's not insane. No, we'll drop that subject.'

Henry felt Humphrey's eyes on him. Sombre cold eyes. And he fell again, in his misery, to sighting along his cane. It seemed to Henry that the world was reeling to disaster. His young, over keen imagination was painting ugly, inescapable pictures of a savage world in which all effort seemed to fail.

Between Humphrey and himself a gulf had opened. It was growing wider every minute. Nothing he could say would help; words were no good. He was afraid he might try to talk. It would be like him; floods of talk, meaningless, mere words, really mere nerves. He clamped his lips on that fear.

If I understand Henry, the thing that had brought him to despair—and he was in despair—was neither the sorry condition of the business, nor the trouble with Cicely. These had confused and saddened him. But the hopelessness had come after he saw Humphrey's face and eyes and caught that cool note in his voice. To the day of his death Henry couldn't endure hostility in those close about him. He had to have friendly sympathy, an easy give and take of the spirit in which his naïveté would not be misunderstood. This sort of atmosphere provided, apparently, the only soil in which his faculties could take root and grow. Hostility in those he had been led to trust disarmed him, crushed him.

'Hump,' he ventured now, weakly, 'I think—maybe—you'd better show me those figures. I—I'll try to understand 'em. I will.'

Humphrey gave a little snort; brushed the idea away with a sweep of a long hand.

'No use!' he said brusquely. He rolled down the desktop and locked it with a snap. 'Getting stale myself. Sleep on it. Not a thing you can do, Hen!' He knocked the ashes from his pipe, gloomily. Buttoned his vest. Suddenly he broke out with this:—

'You're a lucky brute, Hen!'

Henry started; glanced up; fumbled at his moustache. 'You're wondering why I said that. But, man, you're a genius—Yes, you are! I have to plug for it. But you've got the flare. You know well enough what's loaded all this circulation on us. Your stories! Not a thing else. You'll do more of 'em. You'll be famous.'

'Oh, no, Hump I You don't know how I've——'

'Yes, you'll be famous. I won't. It's a gift—fame, success. It's a sort of edge God—or something—puts on a man. A cutting edge. You've simply got it. I simply haven't.'

Henry pulled and pulled at his moustache.

'And you've got a girl—a lovely girl. She's mad about you—oh, yes she is! I know. I've seen her look at you.'

'But, Hump, you don't just know what——'

'She doesn't have to hide her feelings. Not seriously, not with a lying smile. And you don't have to hide yours. You haven't got this furtive rope around your neck, strangling the breath of decent morality out of your soul. Thank God you don't know what it means—that struggle. She'll be announcing her engagement one of these days.

'There'll be presents and flowers. You'll get stirred up and write something a thousand times better than you know how to write. Money will come—oh, yes it will! It'll roll to you, Hen. For a time. Or at times. And you'll marry—a nice clean wedding. God, just to think of it is like the May winds off the lake!'

He threw out his long arms. Henry thought, perversely enough, that he looked like Lincoln.

'But the greatest thing of all is that you're twenty. Think of it! Twenty!... Hen, when I was twenty I put my life on a schedule for five years. They were up last month.

'I was to be flying at twenty-four. Think of it—flying! Through the air, man! Like a gull! At twenty-five I was to be famous and rich. A conqueror! I slaved for that. Worked days and nights and Sundays for that. Sweated for the Old Man there on the Voice; put up with his stupid little insults.'

He sprang up; got into his coat; looked at his watch.

'I'm late. Got to stop at the rooms too. Mildred'll be wondering. You can stay here if you like.'

But Henry clung to him. Around the back street they went. And Humphrey talked on.

'Well, I'm twenty-five! And where've I got? I love a woman. Hen, I hope you'll never be torn as I'm torn now. You think you've been through things. Why, you're an innocent babe. I've got a woman's name—and that's a woman's life, Hen!—in my hands. It's a muddle. Maybe there's tragedy in it. May never work out. Sometimes I feel as if we were going straight over a precipice, she and I. It goes dark. It suffocates me.... It's costing me everything. It'll take money—a lot of it—money I haven't got. If the paper goes, my last hopes go with it. If we can't turn that corner. Everything comes down bang. No use.'

Henry tried to say, 'Oh, I guess we'll turn our corner all right;' but if the words passed his lips at all it was only as a whisper.

They were a hundred feet from the alley back of Parmenter's. It was dark now, there in the shade of the double row of maples. Humphrey stopped short; pressed his hands to his eyes; then looked at Henry.

'You coming to the rooms, too?' he asked.

Henry nodded.

'I don't know's I—I was forgetting, so many things—Oh well, come along. It hardly matters.'

At the alley entrance a man intercepted them; said, 'This is Henry Calverly, ain't it?' Struck a match and read an extraordinary mumble of words. He struck other matches, and read hurriedly on. Then he moved apologetically away, leaving Henry backed limply against a board fence.

Humphrey stood waiting, a tall shadow of a man. To him Henry turned, feeling curiously weak in the legs and gone at the stomach.

'What is it?' he asked, weakly, meekly. 'I couldn't understand. Did he ar—arrest me or something?'

'Charlie Waterhouse has sued you for libel. Ten thousand dollars. Come on. I can't wait.'

'But—but—but that's foolish. He can't——'

'That's how it is.' Humphrey was grim.

They walked in silence up the alley. Henry stood by while his partner unlocked the neat front door to the old barn, a white door, with one white step and an iron scraper. He could just make them out in the dusk. He wondered if he mightn't presently wake up and find it a dream.... Old Hump!

They stood in the shop. Humphrey had switched on one light; he looked now, his face deeply seamed, his eyes a little sunken, at the dim shadowy metal lathes, the huge reels of copper wire, the tool benches, the rows of wall boxes filled with machine parts, the small electric motors hanging by twisted strings or wires from the ceiling joists, the heavy steel wheels in frames, the great box kites and the spruce and silk planes, in sections, the gas engine, the water motor, the wheels, shafts, and belting overhead.

He bent his sombre eyes on Henry.

That youth, aching at heart, bruised of spirit, unaware of the figure he made, was too far gone to be further puzzled by the weary, mocking smile that flitted across Humphrey's face.

'Hump!' he cried out: 'What'll we do!'

'Do? Sleep over it. Raise some more money?'

'But how?'

Humphrey waved a hand at the machinery. 'All this. And my library upstairs. They've stood me more'n four thousand, altogether. Ought to fetch something.'

'But—but—ten thousand!' Henry whispered the amount with awe as well as misery.

'Oh, that! Your trouble! Why, you'll sleep over that, too, and to-morrow I suppose you'll talk to Harry Davis's father.' The senior Davis, Arthur P., was a Simpson Street lawyer. 'They'll sting you. But they don't expect any ten thousand.'

'But what I said is true! Charlie Waterhouse is a——'

'What's that got to do with it. You can't prove it. And we aren't strong enough to hire counsel and detectives and run him to earth. Doesn't look as if we had the barest breath of life in us. Charlie'll think of your uncle next, and attach your mother's estate.'

He said this with unusual roughness. Then he went upstairs; stamped around for a brief time; came hurrying down.

Henry, now, was sitting dejectedly on a work-bench.

'Hump—please!—you don't know how I feel. I——'

'And,' replied the senior partner, 'I don't care. I don't care how I feel, either. We either save the paper this week or we don't. That's what I care about right now.'

'I—I won't let you sell your things, Hump.' An unconvincing assertion, from the limp figure on the bench.

'You?' Humphrey stared at him with something near contempt—stared at the moustache and the cane. 'You? You won't let me?... For God's sake, shut up!'

With which he went out, slamming the door.

For a time Henry continued to sit there. Then he dragged himself upstairs, went to his bookcase and got the book entitled Will Power and Self Mastery.

He turned the pages until he hit upon these paragraphs:—'Every machine, every cathedral, every great ship was a thought before it could become a fact. Build in your brain.

'Through the all-enveloping ether drifts the invisible electricity that is all life, all energy. Open yourself to it. Make yourself a conductor. Stupidity and fear are resistants; cast these out. Make your brain a dynamo and drive the world.'

This seemed a good idea.