Henry Is Twenty: A Further Episodic History of Henry Calverly, 3rd. Merwin Samuel

full. He had parlour tricks. Out of amateur opera experience he had picked up a superficial knack at comedy dancing. He did all he knew. He taught an absurd little team song and dance to Corinne, with Mrs Henderson (who had at last come up) improvising at the piano. And Corinne, flushed and pretty, clung to his hand and laughed herself speechless. Once in her desperate confusion over the steps she sank to the floor and sat in a merry heap until Henry lifted her up. Then Henry imitated Frank Daniels singing ‘The man with an elephant on his hands,’ and H. C. Bamabee singing The Sheriff of Nottingham, and De Wolf Hopper doing Casey at the Bat. All were clever bits; the ‘Casey’ exceptionally so. They applauded him. Even Humphrey, silent now, leaning on an end of the piano, watching Mrs Henderson’s flashing little hands, clapped a little.

      Once Humphrey went rather moodily to a window and peered out.

      Mrs Henderson followed him; slipped her hand through his arm; asked quietly, ‘Who lives across the alley?’

      ‘It’s the Presbyterian parsonage,’ he replied, slightly grim.

      It was after midnight when they set out, whispering, giggling a little in the alley, for Chestnut Avenue.

      ‘These sand-flies are fierce,’ said Henry. ‘You girls better take our handkerchiefs.’

      They circled on lawns to avoid the swirling, crunching, softly suffocating clouds of insects. Nearer the lake it grew worse. At the corner of Chestnut and Simpson they stopped short. Mrs Henderson, pressing the handkerchief to her face, clung in humorous helplessness to Humphrey’s arm.

      He looked down at her. Suddenly he stooped, gathered her up in his arms as if she were a child, and carried her clear through the plague into the shadows of Chestnut Avenue.

      Henry, running with Corinne pressing close on his arm, caught a glimpse of his face. The expression on it added a touch of alarm to the pæan of joy in Henry’s brain.

      They stepped within the Henderson screen door to say good-night.

      ‘Let’s do something to-morrow night – walk or go biking or row on the lake,’ said Mrs Henderson. ‘You two had better come down for dinner. Any time after six.’

      ‘How about you?’ Henry whispered to Corinne. ‘Do you want me to come… Will and Fred…’

      Corinne’s firm long hand slipped for a moment into his. He gripped it. The pressure was returned.

      ‘Don’t be silly!’ she breathed, close to his ear.

      8

      The sand-flies served as an excuse for silence between Humphrey and Henry on the walk back. Nevertheless, the silence was awkward. It held until they were up in the curiously, hauntingly empty living-room.

      Humphrey scraped and lighted his pipe.

      Henry, rather surprisingly unhappy again, was moving toward a certain closed door.

      ‘Tell me,’ said Humphrey gruffly, slowly, ‘where is Mister Arthur V. Henderson?’

      ‘He travels for the Camman Company, reapers and binders and ploughs.’

      Humphrey very deliberately lighted his pipe.

      Henry moved on toward the closed door. Emotions were stirring uncomfortably within him. And conflicting impulses. Suddenly he shot out a muffled ‘Good-night,’ and entered the bedroom, shutting the door after him.

      An hour later Humphrey – a gaunt figure in nightgown and slippers, pipe in mouth – tapped at that door.

      Henry, only half undressed, flushed of face, dripping with sweat, quickly opened it.

      Humphrey looked down in surprise at a fully packed trunk and suit-case and a heap of bundles tied with odd bits of twine – sofa cushions, old clothes, what not.

      ‘What’s all this?’ Humphrey waved his pipe.

      ‘Well – I just thought I’d go in the morning.’

      ‘Don’t be a dam’ fool.’

      ‘But – but’ – Henry threw out protesting hands – ‘I know I’m no good at all these fussy things. I’d just spoil your – ’

      The pipe waved again. ‘That’s all disposed of, Hen.’ A somewhat wry smile wrinkled the long face. ‘Mildred Henderson’s running it, apparently. There’s a certain Mrs Olson who is to come in mornings and clean up. And – oh yes, I’ve got a lot of change for you. Your share was only eight-five cents.’

      There was a long silence. Henry looked at his feet; moved one of them slowly about on the floor.

      ‘We’re different kinds,’ said Humphrey. ‘About as different as they make’em. But that, in itself, isn’t a bad thing.’

      He thrust out his hand.

      Henry clasped it; gulped down an all but uncontrollable uprush of feeling; looked down again.

      Humphrey stalked back to his room.

      Thus began the odd partnership of Weaver and Calverly. Though is not every partnership a little odd?

      III – THE STIMULANT

      1

      Miss Wombast looked up from her desk in the Sunbury Public Library and beheld Henry Calverly, 3rd. Then with a slight fluttering of her pale, blue-veined eyelids and a compression of her thin lips she looked down again and in a neat practised librarian’s hand finished printing out a title on the-catalogue card before her.

      For Henry Calverly was faintly disconcerting to her. Though it was only eleven o’clock, and a Tuesday, he was attired in blue serge coat, snow white trousers and (could she have seen through the desk) white stockings and shoes. His white négligé shirt was decorated at the neck with a ‘four-in-hand’ of shimmering foulard, blue and green. In his left hand was a rolled-up creamy-white felt hat and the crook of a thin bamboo stick. With his right he fussed at the fringe on his upper lip, which was somewhat nearer the moustache stage than it had been last week. Behind his nose glasses and their pendant silk cord his face was sober; the gray-blue eyes that (Miss Wombast knew) could blaze with primal energy were gloomy, or at least tired; there was a furrow between his blond eyebrow’s. He had the air of a youth who wants earnestly to concentrate without knowing quite how.

      Miss Wombast was a distinctly ‘literary’ person. She read Meredith, Balzac, De Maupassant, Flaubert, Zola, and Howells. She was living her way into the developing later manner of Henry James. She talked, on occasion, with an icy enthusiasm that many honest folk found irritating, of Stevenson’s style and of Walter Pater.

      It was Miss Wombast’s habit to look in her books for complete identification of the living characters she met. She studied all of them, coolly, critically, at boardinghouse and library. Naturally, when a living individual refused to take his place among her gallery of book types, she was puzzled. One such was Henry Calverly.

      She had known something of his checkered career in high school, where he had directed the glee club, founded and edited The Boys’ Journal, written a rather bright one-act play for the junior class. Indeed the village in general had been mildly aware of Henry. He had stood out, and Miss Wombast herself had sung a modest alto in the Iolanthe chorus, two years back, under Henry’s direction and had found him impersonally, ingenuously masterful and a subtly pleasing factor in her thought-world. He had made a success of that mob. The big men of the village gave him a dinner and a purse of gold. After all of which, his mother had died, he had run, apparently, through his gifts and his earnings, and settled down to a curiously petty reporting job, trotting up and down Simpson Street collecting useless little items for The Weekly Voice of Sunbury. Other young fellows of twenty either went to college or started laying the foundations of a regular job in Chicago. Those that amounted to anything. You could see pretty plainly ahead of each his proper line of development. Yet here was Henry, who had stood out, working half-heartedly at the sort of job you associated with the off-time of poor students, dressing altogether too conspicuously, wasting hours – daytimes, when a young fellow ought to be working – with this girl and that. For a long time it had been