6
Back of the old Parmenter place the barn was dark. Henry felt relief. He was tingling with excitement. He couldn't move slowly. His fists were clenched. Every nerve in his body was strung tight.
He was thinking hopelessly, 'I must relax.'
He crept through the dim shop, among Humphrey's lathes, belts, benches of tools, big kites and rows of steel wheels mounted in frames. There were large planes, too, parts of the gliders Humphrey had been puttering with for a long time. Three years, he had once said.
Henry lingered on the stairs and looked about the ghostly rooms. Beams of moonlight came in through the windows and touched this and that machine. He felt himself attuned to all the trouble, the disaster, in the universe. Life was a tragic disappointment. Nothing ever came right. People didn't succeed; they struggled and struggled to breast a mighty, tireless current that swept them ever backward.
Poor old Hump! He had put money into this shop. All the little he had; or nearly all. And into the technical library that lined his bedroom walls upstairs. His daily work at the Voice office was just a grind, to keep body and soul together while the experiments were working out. Hump was patient.
'Until I moved in here,' Henry thought, with a disturbingly passive sort of' bitterness, 'and brought girls and things. He doesn't have his nights and Sundays for work any more. Hump could do big things, too.'
He went on up the stairs and switched on the lights in the living-room.
He caught sight of his face in a mirror. It was white.
There was a look of strain about the eyes. The little moustache, turned up at the ends, mocked him.
'I'll shave it off,' he said aloud.
He even got out his razor and began nervously stropping it.
He was alarmed to discover that his control of his hands was none too good. They moved more quickly than he meant them to, and in jerks.
Too, the notion of shaving his moustache struck him weakness, an impulse to be resisted. Too much like retreating. Subtly like that.
He put the razor back in its drawer.
In the centre of the living-room rug, standing there, stiffly, he said:—
'I'll face them. I'll go down fighting. They shan't say I surrendered.'
He walked round and round the room.
He had never in his life felt anything like this jerky nervousness. A restlessness that wouldn't permit him so much as to sit down.
While in the Gleaner office he had hardly been aware of McGibbon. He certainly hadn't listened to him.
But now, like a blow, everything McGibbon had said came to him. Every syllable. Suddenly he could see the man, towering ever him, pounding his desk. Talking—talking—full of fresh hopes while the world crumbled around him. More disaster! It was the buzzing song of the old globe as it spun endlessly on its axis. Disaster!... The advertisers had at last combined against the paper. Old Weston had called McGibbon's note. That must have taken about the last of Henry's thousand. They were broke.
His hand brushed his coat pocket. It bulged with copy paper. He must have thrust it back there absently, at the office.
He drew it out and gazed at it.
It was curious; he seemed to see it as a printed page, with a title at the top, and his name. He couldn't see what the title was. Yet it was there, and it was good.
His restlessness grew. Again he walked round and round the room. There was a glow in his breast. Something that burned and fired his nerves and drove him as one is driven in a dream. Either he must rush outdoors and wander at a feverish pace around the town and up the lake shore—walk all night—or he must sit down and write.
He sat down. Picked up an atlas of Humphrey's and wrote on his lap. And he wrote, from the beginning, as he would have walked had he gone out, in a fever of energy, gripping the pencil tightly, holding his knees up a little, heels off the floor. The colour reappeared about his forehead and temples, then on his cheeks.
When Humphrey came in, after midnight, he was in just this posture, writing at a desperate rate. The floor all about him was strewn with sheets of paper. One or two had drifted off to the centre of the room. He didn't hear his friend come up the stairs.' When he saw him, standing, looking down, something puzzled, he cried out excitedly':—
'Don't Hump!'
Humphrey resisted the impulse to reply with a 'Don't what?'
'Go on! Don't disturb me!'
'You seem to be hitting it up.'
'I am. I can't talk! Please—go away! Go to bed. You'll make me lose it!'
Humphrey obeyed.
Later—well along in the night—he awoke.
There was a crack of light about his door. He turned on his own light. It was quarter to three.
'Here!' he called. 'What on earth are you up to, Hen?' A chair scraped. Then Henry came to the door and burst it open. His coat was off now, and his vest open. He had unbuttoned his collar in front so that the two ends and the ends of his tie hung down. His hair was straggling down over his forehead.
'Do you know what time it is, Hen?'
'No. Say—listen to this! Just a few sentences. You liked the piece I did about the Business Men's Picnic, remember. Well, this has sorta grown out of it. It's just the plain folks along Simpson Street. Say! There's a title for the book.'
'For the what!'
'The book. Oh, there'll be a lot of them. Sorta sketches. Or maybe they're stories. I can't tell yet. Plain folks of Simpson Street. Yes, that's good. Wait a second, while I write it down. The thing struck me all at once—to-night!—Queer, isn't it!—thinking about the folks along the street—Bill Hemple, and Jim Smith in your press room with the tattooed arms, and old Boice and Charlie Waterhouse, and the way Bob McGibbon blew into town with a big dream, and the barber shop—Schultz and Schwartz's—and Donovan's soda fountain, and Izzy Bloom and the trouble about his boys in the high school, and all his fires, and Mr Draine, the Y.M.C.A. secretary that's been in the British Mounted Police in Mashonaland—think of it! In Africa—and——'
'Would you mind'—Humphrey was on an elbow, blinking sleepy eyes—'would you mind talking a little more slowly. Good lord! I can't——'
'All right, Hump. Only I'm excited, sorta. You see, it just struck me that there's as much romance right here on Simpson Street as there is in Kipling's Hills or Bagdad or Paris. Just the way people's lives go. And what old Berger's really thinking about when he tells you the vegetables were picked yesterday.'
Humphrey gazed—wider awake now—at the wild figure before him. And a thrill stirred his heart. This boy was supposed to be crushed.
'How much have you done?' he asked soberly.
'Most finished this first one. It's about old Boice and Charlie Waterhouse and Mr Weston——'
'Gee!' said Humphrey.
'I call it, The Caliph of Simpson Street.'
'Well—see here, you're going to bed, aren't you?'
'Oh, yes. But listen.' And he began reading aloud.
Humphrey waved his arms.
'No, no! For heaven's sake, go to bed, Hen!'
'Well, but—oh, say! Just thought of something!' And he went out, chuckling.
Humphrey awoke again at eight. Through his open door came a light that was not altogether of the sun.
The incident of the earlier morning came to him in confused form, like a dream.
He sprang out of bed.
There, still bending over the atlas, was Henry. The sheets of paper lay like drifts of snow about him now. His pencil was flying.
He looked up. His face was white and red in spots now. He was grinning, apparently out of sheer happiness.
'Say,' he cried, 'listen to this! It's one I call, The Cauliflowers of the Caliph. Oh, by the way, I've changed the title of the book to Satraps of the Simple.
'The whole book'll be sort of imaginary, like that. It's queer. Just as if it came to be out of the air. Things I never thought of in my life. Only everything I ever knew's going into it. Things I'd forgotten.'
'Hen,' said Humphrey, 'are you stark mad?'
'Me? Why—why no, Hump!' The grin was a thought sheepish now. 'But—well, Bob McGibbon said we needed stuff for the paper.'
'How many stories have you written already?'
'Just three.'
'Three! In one night!'
'But they're short, Hump. I don't believe-they average over two or three thousand words. I think they're good. You know, just the way they made me feel. Funny idea—Bagdad and Simpson Street, all mixed up together.'
'One thing's certain, Hen. You're an extremely surprising youth, but right here's where you quit. I don't propose to have a roaring maniac here in the rooms. On my hands.'
'Oh, Hump, I can't quit now! You don't understand. It's wonderful. It just comes. Like taking dictation.'
'Dictation is what you're going to take. Right now. From me. Brush up your clothes, and pick up all that mess while I dress. We'll go out for some breakfast.'
'Not now, Hump! Wait—I promise I'll go out a little later.'
'You'll go now. Get up.'
Henry obeyed. But he nearly fell back again.
'Gosh!' he murmured.
'Stiff, eh?'
'I should smile. And sorta weak.'
'No wonder. Come on, now! And I want your promise that after breakfast you'll go straight to bed.'
'Hump, I can't.'
This, apparently, was the truth. He couldn't.
He stopped in at Jackson's Book Store (formerly B. F. Jones's) and bought paper and pencils: Then, in a thrill of fresh importance, he bought penholders, large desk blotters, a flannel pen-wiper with a bronze dog seated in the centre, a cut-glass inkstand, a ruler, half a dozen pads of a better paper, a partly abridged dictionary, Roget's Thesaurus, (for years he had casually wondered what a Thesaurus was), a round glass paperweight with a gay butterfly imprisoned within, four boxes of wire clips, assorted sizes, and, because he saw it, Crabb's Synonyms. Then he saw an old copy of The Thousand and One Nights and bought that.
It seemed to him that he ought to be equipped for his work. Before he went out he asked the prices of the better makes of typewriters.
And for the first time in two years, he uttered the magic but too often fatal words:—
'Just charge it, if you don't mind.'