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.