He emerged as the focus of interest for a large, exuberant crowd of loiterers. A camera clicked, and Henry saw that the man at the shutter was one of the Herald’s staff photographers. A youthful reporter caught up with him, and asked him what he had to say for publication. “Say for publication?” repeated Henry, dully. “Why, you can say––” He walked half a block before he completed the sentence. “You can say if I said it, you couldn’t print it anyway.”
And although the reporter paced him for a quarter of a mile, Henry never opened his mouth again. He was curiously obsessed, as men under heavy mental pressure are so often obsessed, by a ridiculously trivial detail. How was he going to enter that forty-five dollars on his books?
He had intended to go straight home to Anna, but automatically his steps led him to the Orpheum, where he went into his tiny office and sat down at his desk. There were two envelopes on his blotter; he slit them, diffidently, and found a bill from the novelty house which had supplied the souvenirs, and a supplementary statement from the decorator.
He opened a fat ledger, took up a pencil, and began to jot down figures on the back of one of the envelopes. Already, by remodelling the the theatre, he had lost two month’s headway, and spent three times too much money, and if Sunday performances were to be eliminated.... He threw down the pencil, and sat back spiritless. The good-wishes of all his friends, last night, had turned sour in his possession. To reach his goal, he should have to contrive, somehow, to fill nearly every seat at nearly every performance for the balance of the year. It was all well enough to have self-confidence, and courage, but it was better to look facts in the face. He had come to an impasse. Not only that, but overnight his property, by virtue of this Sunday enforcement 141 and its effect upon the trade, had seriously depreciated in value. If it had been worth thirty-seven thousand five hundred yesterday, it wasn’t worth a penny more than twenty today. And he could have had Standish’s certified check, and got out from under. And he had thrown away in improvements almost every cent that he had borrowed against the original value. He was hardly better off, today, than if he had carried through his first bargain with Mr. Mix.
He would have to go home to Anna, and confess that he was beaten by default. He would have to explain to her, as gently as he could, that the road which led to the end of the rainbow was closed to traffic. He would have to admit to her that as far as he could see, he was destined to go on living indefinitely in a jerry-built apartment, with the odour of fried onions below, and the four children and the phonograph overhead. And Anna would have to go on pinch-hitting for cook, and waitress, and chambermaid, and bottle-washer––she would have to go on with the desecration of her beautiful hands in dish-water, and the ruin 142 of her complexion over the kitchen-stove. The clothes that he had planned to buy for her, the jewels, the splendid car––the cohort of servants he had planned for her––the social prestige! And instead of that, he was nothing but a fragment of commercial driftwood, and he couldn’t afford, now, to buy her so much as a new hat, without a corresponding sacrifice.
And yet––involuntarily, he stiffened––and yet he’d be hanged if he went back and acted like a whipped pup. No, he was supposed to be a man, and his friends and Anna believed in him, an he’d be hanged if he went back and confessed anything at all, admitted anything. It was all well enough to look facts in the face, but it was better still to keep on fighting until the gong rang. And when he was fighting against the cant purity and goodness of Mr. Mix, and the cold astigmatism of Aunt Mirabelle, he’d be hanged if he quit in the first round. No, even if Henry himself knew that he was beaten, nobody else was going to know it, and Anna least of all.
At five o’clock, he came blithely into his living-room: and as he saw Anna’s expression, his 143 own changed suddenly. He had thought to find her in tears; but she was coming to him with her usual welcome, her usual smile.
Henry didn’t quite understand himself, but he was just the least bit offended, regardless of his relief. You simply couldn’t tell from one minute to the next what a woman was going to do. By all precedent, Anna should have been enjoying hysterics, which Henry had come prepared to treat.
“Well,” he said, “you’d better cancel that order for golden pheasants, old dear.” She stopped short, and stared at him curiously, as though the remark had come from a stranger.