Part 12

'Me? Why, over at Rockwell Park. Bob McGibbon wanted me to see about a regular correspondent for the “Rockwell Park Doings.”'

'Heard anything?'

'Me? No. Why?... Hump, what is it? What you getting at?'

'Then I've got to tell you.' He swung his feet around; sat up; emptied his pipe, then filled it.

'Is it--is it--about me, Hump?'

'Yes. It is.'

'Well--then--hadn't you better tell me?'

'I'm trying to, Hen. It's dam' unpleasant. You remember--you told me once--early in the summer--' Humphrey, usually most direct, was having difficulty in getting it out--'you told me you rode a tandem up to Hoffmann's Garden with that little Wilcox girl.'

'Oh, that! That was nothing. Why all the time I lived at Mrs Wilcox's I never----'

'Yes, I know. Let me try to tell this, Hen. It's hard enough. She's in a scrape. That girl. There's a big row on. I'm not going into the details, so far as I've heard 'em. There ugly. They wouldn't help. But her mother's collapsed. Her uncle and aunt have turned up and taken the girl off somewhere. He's a butcher on the North Side.' Henry was pale but attentive.

'In all the time I lived there,' he began again...

'Please, Hen! Wait! It is one of those mean scandals that tear up a town like this every now and then. Boils up through the crust and has to be noticed. It's a beastly thing. The number of men involved... some older ones... and young Bancroft Widdicombe has left town. There's some queer talk about her marrying him. And they say one or two others have run away. Widdicombe got out before the storm broke. Jim Smith says he's been heard from at San Francisco.'

'But they can't say of me----'

'Hen, they can and they do.'

'But I can prove----'

'What can you prove? What chance will you have to prove anything? You were disturbed when Martha Caldwell and the party with Charles H. Merchant caught you with her up at Hoffmann's----'

'But, Hump, I didn't _want_ to take her out that night! And it's the only time I ever really talked to her except once or twice in the boarding-house.'

He was speaking with less energy now. He felt the blow. Not as he would feel it a few hours later; but he felt it.

Humphrey watched him.

'It has brought things home to me,' he said uncertainly. 'The sort of thing that can happen. When you're caught in a drift, you don't think, of course... Now, Hen, listen! This is real trouble. It's going to hit you about to-morrow--full force. It's got to be faced. I don't want to think that you'd run----'

'Oh, no,' Henry put in mechanically, 'I won't run.'

'I'm sure you won't. But it's got to be faced. You're hit especially.'

'But why, when I----'

'Because you lived alone there, in the boarding-house, for two years. And you were caught with her at Hoffmann's, she in bloomers, drinking beer. Just a cheap little tough. And there isn't a thing you can do but live it down. Nobody will say a direct word to you.'

'That's what I'll do,' said Henry, 'live it down.'

'It'll be hard, Hen.'

Henry sighed. 'I've faced hard things, Hump.'

'Yes, you have, in a way.'

'I'll wash up. Where we going to eat? Stanley's?'

'I suppose. I don't feel like eating much.'

It was not until they had started out that Henry gave signs of a deeper reaction.

On the outer doorstep he stood motionless.

'Coming along?' asked Humphrey, trying to hide his anxiety.

'Why--yes. In a minute... Say, Hump, do you suppose they'll--you know, I ain't afraid'--an uprush of feeling coloured his voice, brought a shake to it--'I don't know. Perhaps I _am_ afraid. All those people--you know, at Stanley's...'

Humphrey did an unusual thing; laid his hand on Henry's shoulder affectionately; then took his arm and led him along the alley, saying:--

'We'll go down to the lunch counter. It's just as well, Hen. Better get sure of yourself first.'

He wondered, as they walked rapidly on--Henry had a tendency to walk fast and faster when brooding or excited--whether the boy would ever get sure of himself. There were queer, bitter, profoundly confusing thoughts in his own mind, and an emotional tension, but back of all this, coming through it and softening him, his feeling for Henry. It was something of an elder brother's feeling, I think. Henry seemed very young. It was wicked that he had to suffer with all those cynical older men. It might mark the boy for life. Such things happened.

He decided to watch him closely. Sooner or later the thing would hit him full. He would have to be protected then. Even from himself, perhaps. In a way it oughtn't to be worse for him than it had been after the Hoffmann's Garden incident.

But it was worse. The other had been, after all, no more than an incident. This, now, was an overpowering fact. The town didn't have to notice the other. And despite the gossiping instinct, your small community is rather glad to edge away from unpleasant surmises that are not established facts. Facts are so uncompromising. And so disrupting. And sometimes upsetting to standardised thought.

'That's it,' thought Humphrey--he was reduced to thought Henry was striding on in white silence--'it's a fact. They can't evade it. Only thing they can do, if they're to keep comfortable about their dam' town, is to kill everybody connected with the mess. Have to revise party and dinner lists. And it'll raise Ned with the golf tournament. They'll resent all that. And they'll have to show outsiders that the thing is an amazing exception. Nothing else going on like it. They'll have to show that.'

3

The next morning Henry--stiff, distrait, his eyes wandering a little now and then and his sensitive mouth twitching nervously--breakfasted with Humphrey at Stanley's.

People--some people--spoke to him. But he winced at every greeting. Humphrey watched him narrowly. He was ablaze with self-consciousness. But he held his head up pretty well.

He was all shut up within himself. Since their talk of the evening he hadn't mentioned the subject. It was clear that he couldn't mention it. He spoke of curiously irrelevant things. The style of Robert Louis Stevenson, for one. During the walk from the rooms to Stanley's. And then he brought up Bob McGibbon's theory that even with a country weekly, if you made your paper interesting enough you would get readers and the readers would bring the advertising He asked if Humphrey thought it would work out. 'It's important to me, you know, Hump. I've got a cool thousand up on the _Gleaner_. It's like betting on Bob McGibbon's idea to win.' His voice trembled a little. There were volcanoes of feeling stirring within the boy. He would erupt of course, sooner or later. Humphrey found the experience moving to the point of pain.

When he entered the _Gleaner_ office, Bob McGibbon, looking up at him anxiously, said good-morning, then pursed his lips in thought.

He found occasion to say, later:--

'Henry, how are you taking this thing?'

Henry swallowed, glanced out of the window, then threw out one hand with an expressive gesture and raised his eyes.

'Oh,' he said, 'all right. I--it's not true, Bob. Not about me.'

'That's just what I tell 'em,' said McGibbon eagerly. 'What you going to do? Go right on?'

'Well--why, yes! I can't run away.'

'Of course not. These things are mean. In a small town. Hypocrisy all round. I was thinking it over this morning, and it occurred to me you might like to get off by yourself and do some real writing for the paper. That's what we need, you know. Sketches. Snappy poetry. Little pictures of life-like George Ade's stuff in the _Record_. Or a bit of the 'Gene Field touch. Something they'd have to read. Make the _Gleaner_ known. Put it on every centre table in Sunbury. That's what we really need from you, you know. Your own stuff, not ours. Take this reception to-night at the Jenkins'. Anybody can cover that. I'll go myself.'

Henry, pale, lips compressed, shook his head.

'No,' said he, after a pause, 'I'll cover it.'

McGibbon considered this, then moved irresolutely back to his desk. Here, for a time, he sat, with knit brows, and stabbed at flies with his pen.

It would be walking into the lion's den, that was all. He wished he could think of a way to hold the boy back. There were complications. The _Gleaner_, just, lately, had been going pretty violently after what McGibbon called the 'Old Cinch.' Without quite enough evidence, they were now virtually accusing Waterhouse of embezzlement, and the others of connivance. Mr Weston was among the most respected in Sunbury, rich, solid, a supporter of all good things'. Though Boice and Waterhouse were unknown to local society, the Westons were intimate with the Jenkinses and their crowd. They all regarded the _Gleaner_ as a scurrilous, libellous sheet, and McGibbon himself as an intruder in the village life. And there was another trouble; very recent. He couldn't speak of it with the boy in this state of mind. Not at the moment. He couldn't see his way... And now, with the realest-scandal Sunbury had known in a decade piled freshly on the paper's bad name. But he couldn't think of a way to keep him from going. The boy was, in a way, his partner. There were little delicacies between them.

Henry went.

The reception given by Mr and Mrs Jenkins to Senator and Madame William M. Watt, was the most important social event of the summer.

The Jenkins's home, a square mansion of yellow brick, blazed with light at every window. Japanese lanterns were festooned from tree to tree about the lawn. An awning had been erected all the way from the front steps to the horse block, and a man in livery stood out there assisting the ladies from their carriages. It was felt by some, it was even remarked in undertones, that the Jenkinses were spreading it on pretty thick, even considering that it was the first really public appearance of the Watts in Sunbury.

The Senator was known principally as titular sponsor for the Watt Currency Act, of fifteen years back... In those days his fame had overspread the boundaries of his own eastern state clear to California and the Mexican border. Older readers will recall that the Watt Bill nearly split a nation in its day. After his defeat for re-election, in the earlier nineties, he had slipped quietly into the obscurity in which he regained until his rather surprising marriage with the very rich, extremely vigorous American woman from abroad who called herself the Comtesse de la Plaine. At the time of his disappearance from public life various reasons had been dwelt on. One was drink. His complexion--the part of it not covered by his white beard--might have been regarded as corroborative evidence. But it was generally understood that he was 'all right' now; a meek enough little man, well past seventy, with an air of life-weariness and a suppressed cough that was rather disagreeable in church. His slightly unkempt beard grew a little to one side, giving his face a twisted appearance. On his occasional appearances about the streets he was always chewing an unlighted cigar. To the growing generation he was a mildly historic myth, like Thomas Buchanan or James G. Blaine.

Mrs Watt--who during her brief residence in Sunbury (they had bought the Dexter Smith place, on Hazel Avenue, in May) had somehow attached firmly to her present name the foreign-sounding prefix, 'Madame'--was a head taller than her husband, with snappy black eyes, a strongly hooked nose and an indomitable mouth. She was not beautiful, but was of commanding presence. The fact that she had lived long in France naturally raised questions. But there appeared to be no questioning either her earlier title or her wealth. If she seemed to lack a few of the refinements of a lady--it was whispered among the younger people that she swore at her servants--still, a rich countess, married to the self-effacing but indubitable author of the Watt Act, was, in the nature of things, equipped to stir Sunbury to the depths.

But the member of this interesting family with whom we are now concerned was the Madame's niece, a girl of eighteen or nineteen who had been reared, it was said, in a convent in France, then educated at a school in the eastern states, and was now living with her aunt for the first time.

Her name fell oddly on ears accustomed to the Bessies, Marys, Fannies, Marthas, Louises, Alices, and Graces of Sunbury. It was Cicely--Cicely Hamlin. It was clearly an English name. It proved, at first, difficult to pronounce, and led to joking among the younger set. The girl herself was rather foreign in appearance. Distinctly French some said. She was slimly pretty, with darkish hair and a quick, brisk, almost eager way of speaking and smiling and bobbing her hair. She used her hands, too, more than was common in Sunbury, a point for the adherents of the French theory. The quality that perhaps most attracted young and old alike was her sensitive responsiveness. Sometimes it was nearly timidity. She would listen in her eager way; then talk, all vivacity--head and hands moving, on the brink of a smile-every moment--then seem suddenly to recede a little, as if fearful that she had perhaps said too much, as if a delicate courtesy demanded that she be merely the attentive, kindly listener. She could play and be merry with the younger crowd. But she had read books that few of them had ever heard of. Plainly--though nothing so complex was plain to Henry at this period--she was a girl of delicate nervous organisation, strung a little tightly; a girl who could be stirred to almost naïve enthusiasms and who could perhaps be cruelly hurt.

Henry had seen her--once on the hotel veranda talking brightly with Mary Ames, who seemed almost stodgy beside her, once on the Chicago train, once or twice driving with Elberforce Jenkins in his high cart. The sight of her had stirred him. Already he had had to fight thoughts of her--tantalisingly indistinct mental visions--during the late night hours between staring wakefulness and sleep. And it was impossible wholly to escape bitterness over the thought that he hadn't met her. He oughtn't to care. He couldn't admit to himself that it mattered. A couple of years back, in his big days, they would have met all right. First thing. Everybody would have seen to it. They would have told her about him. Now... oh well!

He stood in the shadow, out by the carriage entrance, pulling at his moustache. There had been a sort of rushing of the spirit, almost a fervour, in his first determination to face the town bravely. Now for the first time he began to see that the thing couldn't be rushed at. It might take years to build up a new good name--years of slights and sneers, of dull hours and slack nerves. For Henry did know that emotional climaxes pass.

He chose a time, between carriages, when the sheltered walk was empty, to move up toward the house. Everybody here was dressed up--'Wearing everything they've got!' he muttered. He himself had on his blue suit and straw hat and carried his bamboo stick. A thick wad of copy paper protruded from a side pocket. A vest pocket bulged with newly sharpened pencils. It had seemed best not to dress. He wasn't a guest; just the representative of a country weekly.

By the front steps there were arched openings in the canvas. Up there in the light were music and rustling, continuous movement and the unearthly cackling sound that you hear when you listen with a detached mind to many chattering voices in an enclosed space. Mrs Jenkins was up there, doubtless, at the head of a reception line. He knew now, with despair in his heart, that he couldn't mount those steps. Nearly everybody there would know him. He couldn't do it.

He looked around. At one side stood a jolly little group, under the Japanese lanterns. Young people. Two detached themselves and came toward the steps. A third joined them; a girl.

'Here,' said this girl--Mary Ames's voice--'you two wait here. I'll find her.'

Mary came right past him and ran up the steps. Henry drew back, very white, curiously breathless.

The other two stood close at hand. Henry wondered if he could slip away. New carriages had arrived; new people were coming up the walk. He stepped off on the grass. He found difficulty in thinking.

The girl, just across the walk, was Cicely Hamlin. The fellow was Alfred Knight. He worked in the bank; a colourless youth. He plainly didn't know what to say to this very charming new girl. He stood there, shifting his feet.

Henry thought: 'Has he heard yet? Does he know?... Does _she_ know?'

Then Alfred's wandering eye rested on him, hailed him with relief.

'Oh, hallo. Hen;' he said. Then, after a long silence, 'Like you to meet Miss Hamlin. Mr Henry Calverly.'

Al Knight never could remember whether you said the girl's name first or the man's.

But he hadn't heard yet. Evidently. Henry sighed. Since it had to come, it would be almost better...

Miss Cicely Hamlin moved a hesitant step forward; murmured his name.

He had to step forward too.

In sheer miserable embarrassment he raised his hand a little way.

In responsive confusion she raised hers.

But his had dropped.

Hers moved downward as his came up again.

She smiled at this and extended her hand again frankly.

He took it. He didn't know that he was gripping it in a strong nervous clasp.

'I've heard of you,' she said. He liked her voice. 'You write, don't you?'

'Oh yes,' said he huskily, 'I write some.'

She didn't know.

He wondered dully who could have told her of him. It sounded like the old days. It was almost, for a moment, encouraging.

Al Knight drifted away to speak to one of the new-comers.

'Do you write stories?' she asked politely.

'I try to, sometimes. It's awfully hard.'

'Oh yes, I know.'

'Do _you_ write?'

'Why--oh no! But I've wished I could. I've tried a little.'

So far as words went they might as well have been mentioning the weather. It was not an occasion in which words had any real part. He saw, felt, the presence of a girl unlike any he had known--slimly pretty, alive with a quick eager interest, and subtly friendly. She saw, and felt, a white tragic face out of which peered eyes with a gloomy fire in them.

Before Alfred Knight drifted back she asked him to call. Then, at the sight of them, Alfred drifted away again.

'Perhaps,' she added shyly, 'you'd bring some of your stories.'

'I haven't anything I could bring,' he replied, still with that burning look. 'Nothing 'that's any good. If I had...' Then this blazed from him in a low shaky voice: 'You haven't heard what they're saying about me. I can see that. If you had you wouldn't ask me to call.'

'Oh, I'm sure I would,' she murmured, greatly confused.

'You wouldn't. You really couldn't. But I want to say this--quick, before they come!'--for he saw Mary Ames in the doorway--'I've _got_ to say it! They'll tell you something about me. Something dreadful. It isn't true. It--is--not true!'

'She isn't in there,' said Mary, joining them. Then 'Oh!' She looked at Henry with a hint of alarm in her face; said, 'How do you do!' in a voice that chilled him, brought the despair back; then said to Cicely, ignoring him: 'We'd better tell them.' And moved a step toward the group under the lanterns.

Cicely hesitated.

It was happening, right there; and in the cruellest manner. Henry couldn't speak. He felt as if a fire were burning in his brain.

Al Knight, seeing Mary, drifted back.

The group, over yonder, was breaking up. Or coming this way.

Another moment and Elberforce Jenkins--tall, really good-looking in his perfect-fitting evening clothes--stood before them.

He glanced at Henry. Gave him the cut direct.

'All right,' said Elbow Jenkins, addressing Cicely now, 'we'll go without her. She won't mind.'

Still Cicely hesitated. For a moment, standing there, lips parted a little, looking from one to another. Then, with an air of shyness, apparently still confused, she gave Henry her hand.

'Do come,' she said, with a quick little smile. 'And bring the stories. I'm sure I'd like them.'

She went with them, then.

Henry stared after her with wet eyes. Then for a while he wandered alone among the trees. His thoughts, like his pulse, were racing uncontrollably.

It is to be noted that he returned a while later, faced Mrs Jenkins, wrote down the names of all the guests he recognised, and walked, very fast, with a stiff dignity, lips compressed, eyes and brain still burning, down to the _Gleaner_ office.

5

The story had to be written. Not at the rooms, though; Mildred might be there with Humphrey. Sometimes he worked at the Y.M.C.A.

But there was a light in the windows of the _Gleaner_ office, over Hemple's.

McGibbon was up there, bent over his desk in his shirtsleeves, a hand sprawling through his straight ragged hair.

Henry acknowledged his partner's greeting with a grunt; dropped down at his own desk; plunged at the story.

McGibbon looked up once or twice, saw that Henry was unaware of him; continued his own work. His thin face looked worn. He bit his lip a good deal.

'There,' said Henry, finally, with a grim look--'there's the reception story.'

'Oh, all right.' McGibbon came over; took the pencilled script; then sat on the edge of the table beside Henry's desk.

'Haven't got some good filler stuff?' he queried wearily, brushing a hand across his forehead. 'We're going to have a lot of extra space this week.'

He watched Henry, to see if this remark had an effect. It had none. He nibbed his hand slowly back and forth across his forehead.

'The fact is,' he remarked, 'they've landed on us. Pretty hard. The advertisers. Just about all Simpson Street. It's a sort of boycott, apparently. Takes out two-thirds of our advertising. And Weston called my note--that two hundred and forty-eight--for paper. Simply charged it up against our account. Pretty dam' high-handed, I call it!'

His voice was rising. He sprang up, paced the floor.

'They're showing fight,' he ran on. 'We've got to lick 'em. That's my way--start at the drop of the hat. What's a little advertising! Get readers--that's the real trick of it. We'll lick 'em with circulation, that's what we'll do!'

He stood over Henry's desk; even pounded it. The boy didn't seem to get it, even now. He was hardly listening. With his own money at stake. But McGibbon was finding him like that; queer gaps on the practical side. No money sense whatever!

'Henry,' he was crying now, 'it's up to you. You're a genius. It's sheer waste to use you on fool receptions. _Write_, man! WRITE! Let yourself go. Anything--sketches, verse, stories! Let's give 'em what they don't look for in a country paper. Like the old Burlington _Hawkeye_ and that fellow Brann. And the paper in Lahore that nobody would ever have heard of if Kipling hadn't written prose and verse to fill in, here and there. He was a kid, too. There's always, somewhere, a little paper that's famous because a man can _write_. Why shouldn't it be us! Us! Right up here over the meat-market. Why, we can make the little old _Gleaner_ known from coast to coast. We can put Sunbury on the map. Just with your pen, my boy! With your pen! And then where'll old Weston be! Where'll these little two-bit advertisers be!'

He spread his thin hands in a gesture of triumph. Henry looked up now; slowly pushed back his chair; said, in a weak voice, 'I'm tired. Guess I'd better get along;' and walked out.

McGibbon stared after him, his mouth literally open.

6

Back of the old Parmenter place the barn was dark. Henry felt relief. He was tingling with excitement. He couldn't move slowly. His fists were clenched. Every nerve in his body was strung tight.

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.