Henry had Charlie and the town money in the back of his head, of course, when he wrote Sinbad. Probably more than he himself knew. McGibbon sniffed a sensation in the brief, vivid narrative. And a sensation of some sort he had to have. It was now or never with McGibbon.... He was able even to chuckle at the way Charlie would froth. He couldn't admit that the coat fitted, of course. He would just have to froth. It was Henry's naïveté that made the thing so perfect. An older man wouldn't have dared. Henry had just naturally rushed in. Yes, it was perfect.
Bob McGibbon was a hustler. And his nervous quickness of perception had brought him a few small successes and was to bring him larger ones. His Sunbury disaster was perhaps later to be charged to education.
The roots of that particular failure went deep. From first to last his attitude was that of a New Yorker in a small town. He outraged every local prejudice; he alienated, one by one, each friendly influence. He couldn't understand that any such village as Sunbury resents the outsider who insists on pointing out its little human failings. It was recognised here and there as possible that old man Boice and Mr Weston of the bank might be covering up something in the matter of the genial town treasurer; but there was reason enough to believe that Mr Boice and Mr Weston knew pretty well what they were about. That, at least, was the rather equivocal position into which McGibbon by his very energy and assertiveness, drove many a ruffled citizen.
And it had needed very little urging on the part of the three leading citizens (McGibbon had a trick of referring to them in his paper as 'the Old Cinch') to bring about the boycott on the part of the Simpson Street and South Sunbury advertisers. As Charlie Waterhouse himself put it:—
'It ain't what he says about me. I can stand it. Man to man I can attend to him. The thing is, he's hurtin' the town. That's it—he's hurtin' the town.'
3
I have spoken of McGibbon's perception. He knew before reading three paragraphs that Henry had a touch of genius. Before finishing A Kerbstone Barmecide he knew—knew with a mental grasp that was pitifully wasted on the petty business of a country weekly—that nothing comparable had appeared anywhere in the English-speaking world since Plain Tales from the Hills and Soldiers Three. He knew, further, what no Sunbury seems ever able to recognise, that it is your occasional Henry who, as he mentally put it, 'rings the bell.' A queer young man, slightly dudish in dress, unable to fit in any conventional job, unable really to fall into step with his generation, blunderingly but incorrigibly a non-conformist, a moodily earnest yet absurdly susceptible young man, slightly self-conscious, known here and there among those of his age as 'sarcastic,' brilliant occasionally, dogged some of the time, dreamy and irresponsible the rest, yet with charm. A youth who not infrequently was guilty of queer, rather unsocial acts; not of meanness or unkindness, rather of an inability to feel with and for others, to fit. A youth destined to work out his salvation, if at all, alone.
Yes, McGibbon read the signs shrewdly. For which Sunbury owes that erratic editor a small debt that remains unpaid and unrecorded to-day. No doubt that McGibbon brought him out. Encouraged him, spurred him, held him to it.
It was tradition in Sunbury that the two weekly papers should come decorously into the world each Saturday morning for the first delivery of mail. A small pile of each, toward noon was put on sale in Jackson's book store (formerly B. F. Jones's). That was all.
And that was why McGibbon was able, on this Saturday of our story, to shake the town.