He was back at the rooms by nine-fifteen. Before the university clock boomed out the hour of noon, he had written that elusive, extraordinary little classic, A Kerbstone Barmecide, and had jotted down suggestive notes for the story that was later to be known as The Printer and the Pearls.
By this time all thoughts of civic reform had faded out. Charlie Waterhouse, now that The Caliph of Simpson Street was done and, in a surface sense, forgotten, no longer appeared to him as a crook who should be ousted from the local political triumvirate and from town office; he was but a bit of ore in the rich lode of human material with which Henry's fancy was playing. The important fact about the new Waterhouse store-and-office building in South Sunbury, was not that there was reason to believe Charlie had built it with town money but that he had put a medallion bas-relief of himself in terra cotta in the front wall.
Charlie figured, though, unquestionably, in Sinbad the Treasurer.
At noon, deciding that he would stroll out after a little and eat a bite, Henry stretched out on the lounge. Here he dozed, very lightly for an hour or two.
Humphrey stole in, found him tossing there, fully dressed, mumbling in his sleep, and stole out.
But early in the afternoon Henry leaped up. His brain, or his emotions, or whatever the source of his ideas, was a glowing, boiling, seething crater of tantalising, obscurely associated concepts and scraps of characterisation and queerly vivid, half-glimpsed dramatic moments, situations, contrasts. They amounted to a force that dragged him on. The thought that some bit might escape before he could catch it and get it written down kept his pulse racing.
At about half-past four he finished that curious fantasy, Roc's Eggs, Strictly Fresh.
This accomplishment brought a respite. He could see his book clearly now. The cover, the title page and particularly the final sentence. He knew that the concluding story was to be called The Old Man of the Street. He printed out this title; printed, too, several titles of others yet to be written—Ali Anderson and the Four Policemen and Scheherazade in a Livery Stable, and one or two more.
His next performance I find particularly interesting in retrospect. During the long two years of his extreme self-suppression in the vital matters of candy, girls, and charge-accounts, Henry had firmly refused to sing. Without a murmur he had foregone the four or five dollars a Sunday he could easily have picked up in church quartet work, the occasional sums from substituting in this or that male quartet and singing at funerals. It was even more extraordinary that he should have given up, as he did, his old habit of singing to girls. The only explanation he had ever offered of this curious stand was the rather obscure one he gave Humphrey that singing was 'too physical.' Whatever the real complex of motives, it had been a rather violent, or at least a complete reaction.
But now he strode about the room, chin up, chest expanded, brows puckered, roaring out scales and other vocalisings in his best voice. The results naturally were somewhat disappointing, after the long silence, but he kept at it.