Part 16

Sitting there sipping his coffee, Humphrey, half listening, soberly considered his younger friend. Henry was distinctly odd, a square peg in a round world. He was capable of curiously outrageous acts, yet most of them seemed to arise from a downright inability to sense the common attitude, to feel with his fellows. He could be heedless, neglectful, self-centred; but Humphrey had never found meanness or unkindness in him. And he was capable of a passionate generosity. He had, indeed, for Humphrey, the fascination that an erratic and ingenuous but gifted person often exerts on older, steadier natures. You could be angry at him; but you couldn't get over the feeling that you had to take care of him. And it always seemed, even when he was out and out exasperating, that the thing that was the matter with him was the very quality that underlay his astonishing gifts; that he was really different from others; the difference ran all through, from his unexpected, rather self-centred ways of acting and reacting clear up to the fact that he could write what other people couldn't write. 'If they could,' thought Humphrey now, shrewdly, 'very likely they'd be different too.' Take this business of dressing up like a born suburbanite and going to church. It was something of a romantic gesture, But that wasn't all it was. The fight was real, whatever unexpected things it might lead him to do from day to day.

Herbert de Casselles, wooden-faced, dressed impeccably in frock coat, heavy 'Ascot' tie, gray striped trousers perfectly creased, (Henry had never owned a frock coat) ushered him half-way down the long aisle to a seat in Mrs Ellen F. Wilson's pew. He felt eyes on him as he walked, imagined whispers, and set his face doggedly against them all. He had set out in a sort of fervor; but now the thing was harder to do than he had imagined. The people looked cold and hostile. It was to be a long fight. He might never win. The more successful he might come to be, the more some of them would hate him and fight him down... It was queer, Herb de Casselles ushering him.

The organist slid on to his seat, up in the organ loft behind the pulpit; spread out his music and turned up the corners; pulled and pushed on stops and couplers; glanced up into his narrow mirror; adjusted his tie; fussed again with the stops; began to play.

Henry sat up stiffly, even boldly, and looked about. Across the church, in a pew near the front, sat the Watts: the Senator, on the aisle, looking curiously insignificant with his meek, red face and his little, slightly askew chin beard; Madame Watt sitting wide and high over him, like a stout hawk, chin up, nose down, beady eyes fixed firmly on the pulpit; Cicely Hamlin almost fragile beside her, eyes downcast--or was she looking at the hymns?

When Cicely was talking, with her nervous eagerness, her quick smile, her almost Frenchy gestures, she seemed gay. When in repose, as now, her delicate sensitiveness, her slightly sad expression, were evident, even to Henry.

Made him feel in the closing scene of _The Prisoner of Zenda_, where he was bidding the Princess who could never be his a last farewell; the mere sight of her thrilled him with a deep romantic sorrow.

Through the prayers, the announcements, the choir numbers and collection, his sacrificial mood grew more and more intense. It was something of a question whether he could hide his emotion before all these hostile people. The long fight ahead to rebuild his name in the village loomed larger and larger, began to take on an aspect that was almost terrifying. For the first time to-day he felt weakness but she made him feel something as Sothem had made in his heart. He sat very quiet, hands clenched on his knees, and unconsciously thrust out his chin a little.

When the doxology was sung and his head was bowed for the benediction, he had to struggle with a mad impulse to rush out, run down the aisle while people were picking up their hats and things. The thing to do, of course, was to take his time, be natural, move out with the rest. This he did, blazing with self-consciousness, his chin forward.

It was difficult. Several persons--older persons, who had known his mother--stopped him and congratulated him on the brilliant work he was doing. This in the midst of the unuttered hostility that seemed like hundreds of little barbed darts penetrating his skin from every side. He could only blush and mumble. Elderly, innocent Mrs Bedford of Filbert Avenue actually introduced him to her nieces from Boston as a young man of whom all Sunbury was proud. He had to blush and mumble here for a long time, while the line of people crowded decorously past.

At last he got to the door. Stiffly raising his hat as one or two groups of young people recognised him, he moved out to the sidewalk. There he raised his eyes. They met, for a fleeting instant, but squarely, over Herb de Casselles' shoulder, the dark eyes of Cicely Hamlin.

She was sitting on the little forward seat in the black-and-plum Victoria. Madame Watt was settling herself in the back seat. The Senator was stepping in. The plum-coloured footman stood stiffly by. The plum-coloured driver sat stiffly on the box.

Herb de Casselles turned, with a wry smile.

Henry raised his hat, bit his lip, hesitated, hurried on.

Then he heard her voice.

'Oh, Mr Calverly!'

He had to turn back. He knew he was fiery red. He knew, too, that in this state of tortured bewilderment he couldn't trust his tongue for a moment.

Cicely leaned out, with outstretched hand.

He had to take it. The thrill the momentary touch of it gave, him but added a wrench to the torture. Then the Senator's hand had to be taken; finally Madame's.

His pulse was racing; pounding at his temples. What did all this mean!

Cicely, her own colour up a little, speaking quickly, her face lighting up, her hands moving, cried:--

'Oh, Mr Calverly! We heard this morning that the _Gleaner_ has failed and that Mr Boice has it and we aren't to see your stories any more.'

'No,' said Henry, a faint touch of assurance appearing in his heart, mind, voice, 'that isn't so. Mr Boice hasn't got it. We've got it--Humphrey Weaver and I.'

'You mean you have purchased it?' This from the Senator.

'Yay-ah, We bought it yesterday.'

'No!' cried Cicely. 'Really?'

'Yay-ah. We bought it.'

'Then,' commented the Senator, 'you must permit me indeed to congratulate you. It is unusual to find business acumen and enterprise combined with such a literary talent as yours.'

This was pleasing, if stilted. It was beginning to be possible for Henry to smile.

Then Cicely clinched matters.

'You promised to come and read me the others, Mr Calverly. Oh, but you did! You must come. Really! Let me see--I know I shall be at home to-morrow evening.'

Then, for a moment, Cicely seemed to falter. She turned questioningly to her aunt.

Madame Watt certainly knew the situation. She had heard Henry discussed in relation to the Mamie Wilcox incident. She knew how high feeling was running in the village. Just what her motives were, I cannot say. Perhaps it was her tendency to make her own decisions and if possible to make different decisions from those of the folk about her. The instinct to stand out aggressively in all matters was strong within her. And she liked Henry. The flare of extreme individuality in him probably reached her and touched a curiously different strain of extreme individuality within herself. She hated sheep. Henry was not a sheep.

As for Cicely's part of it, I know she had been thrilled when Henry read her the first ten stories. She had read more than the Sunbury girls; and she saw more in his oddities than they were capable of seeing. To fail in any degree to conform to the prevailing customs and thought was to be ridiculous in Sunbury. But she had no more forgotten the jeers that had followed Henry from this very carriage as he chased his hat down Simpson Street the preceding day than had Henry himself. Nor had she forgotten that Herbert de Casselles had been one of that unkind group. And as she certainly knew what she was about, despite her impulsiveness, I prefer to think that her action was deliberately kind and deliberately brave.

'Come to dinner,' said Madame Watt shortly but with a sort of rough cordiality. 'Seven o'clock. To-morrow evening. Informal dress. All right, Watson.'

Cicely settled back, her eyes bright; but gave Henry only the same suddenly impersonal little nod of good-bye that she gave Herbert de Casselles.

The footman leaped to the box. The remarkable carriage rolled luxuriously away on its rubber tyres.

Henry turned, grinning in foolish happiness, on the young man in the frock coat who had not been asked to dinner.

'Walking up toward Simpson, Herb?' he asked.

'Me--why--no, I'm going this way.' And Herb pointed hurriedly southward.

'Well--so long!' said Henry, and headed northward.

The warm sunlight filtered down through the dense foliage. Birds twittered up there. The church procession moving slowly along was brightly dressed; pleasant to see. Henry, head up, light of foot, smiling easily when this or that person, after a moment's hesitation, bowed to him, listened to the birds, expanded his chest in answer to the mellowing sunshine, and gave way, with a fresh little thrill, to the thought:--

'I must buy a frock coat for to-morrow night.'

VIII--THIS BUD OF LOVE

1

|It was mid-August and twenty minutes to eight in the evening. The double rows of maples threw spreading shadows over the pavement, sidewalk and lawns of Hazel Avenue. From dim houses, set far back amid trees and shrubs, giving a homy village quality to the darkness, came through screened doors and curtained 'bay' windows the yellow glow of oil lamps and the whiter shine of electric lights. Here and there a porch light softly illuminated a group of young people; their chatter and laughter, with perhaps a snatch of song, floating pleasantly out on the soft evening air. Around on a side street, sounding faintly, a youthful banjoist with soft fingers and inadequate technique was struggling with _The March Past_.

Moving in a curious, rather jerky manner along the street, now walking swiftly, nervously, now hesitating, even stopping, in some shadowy spot, came a youth of twenty (going on twenty-one). He wore--though all these details were hardly distinguishable even in the patches of light at the street corners, where arc lamps sputtered whitely--neatly pressed white trousers, a 'sack' coat of blue serge, a five-dollar straw hat, silk socks of a pattern and a silken 'four-in-hand' tie. He carried a cane of thin bamboo that he whipped and flicked at the grass and rattled lightly along the occasional picket fence except when he was fussing at the light growth on his upper lip. Under his left arm was a square package that any girl of Sunbury would have recognised instantly, even in the shadows, as a two-pound box of Devoe's chocolates.

If you had chanced to be a resident of Sunbury at this period you would have known that the youth was Henry Calverly, 3rd. Though you might have had no means of knowing that he was about to 'call' on Cicely Hamlin. Or, except perhaps from his somewhat spasmodic locomotion, that he was in a state of considerable nervous excitement.

Not that Henry hadn't called on many girls in his day. He had. But he had called only once before on Cicely (the other time had been that invitation to dinner for which her aunt was really responsible) and had then, in a burning glow of temperament, read her his stories!

How he had read! And read! And read! Until midnight and after. She had been enthusiastic, too.

But he wasn't in a glow now. Certain small incidents had lately brought him to the belief that Cicely Hamlin lacked the pairing-off instinct so common among the young of Sunbury. She had been extra nice to him; true. But the fact stood that she was not 'going with' him. Not in the Sunbury sense of the phrase. A baffling, disturbing aura of impersonally pleasant feeling held him at a distance.

So he was just a young fellow setting forth, with chocolates, to call on a girl. A girl who could be extra nice to you and then go out of her way to maintain pleasant acquaintance with the others, your rivals, your enemies. Almost as if she felt she had been a little too nice and wished to strike a balance; at least he had thought of that. A girl who had been reared strangely in foreign convents; who didn't know _The Spanish Cavalier_ or _Seeing Nellie Home_ or _Solomon Levi_, yet did know, strangely, that the principal theme in Dvorak's extremely new 'New World' symphony was derived from _Swing Low, Sweet Chariot_ (which illuminating fact had stirred Henry to buy, regardless, the complete piano score of that symphony and struggle to pick out the themes on Humphrey's piano at the rooms). A girl who had never seen De Wolf Hopper in _Wang_, or the Bostonians in _Robin Hood_, or Sothem in The Prisoner of Zenda, or Maude Adams or Ethel Barrymore or _anything_. A girl who had none of the direct, free and easy ways of the village young; you couldn't have started a rough-house with her--mussed her hair, or galloped her in the two-step. A girl who wasn't stuck up, or anything like that, who seemed actually shy at times, yet subtly repressed you, made you wish you could talk like the fellow's that had gone to Harvard.

In view of these rather remarkable facts I think it really was a tribute to Cicely Hamlin that the many discussions of her as a conspicuous addition to the youngest set had boiled down to the single descriptive adjective, 'tactful.' Though the characterisation seems not altogether happy; for the word, to me, connotes something of conscious skill and management--as my Crabb put it: 'TACTFUL. See Diplomatic'--and Cicely was not, certainly not in those days, a manager.

Henry, muttered softly, as he walked.

'I'll hand it to her when she comes in.

'No, she'll shake hands and it might get in the way.

'Put it on the table--that's the thing!--on a corner where she'll see it.

'Then some time when we can't think of anything to talk about, I'll say--“Thought you might like a few chocolates.” Sorta offhand. Prevent there being a lull in the conversation.

'Better begin calling her Cicely.'

'Why not? Shucks! Can't go on with “You” and “Say!” Why can't I just do it naturally? The way Herb would, or Elbow, or those fellows.

'“How'd' you do, Cicely! Come on, let's take a walk.”

'No. “Good-evening, Cicely. I thought maybe you'd like to take a walk. There's a moonrise over the lake about half-past eight.” That's better.

'Wonder if Herb'll be there. He'd hardly think to come so early, though. Be all right if I can get her away from the house by eight.'

He paused, held up his watch to the light from the corner, then rushed on.

'Maybe she'd ask me to sit him out, anyway.'

But his lips clamped shut on this. It was just the sort of thing Cicely wouldn't do. He knew it.

'What if she won't go out!'

This sudden thought brought bitterness. A snicker had run its course about town--in his eager self-absorption he had wholly forgotten--when Alfred Knight, confident in an engagement to call, had hired a horse and buggy at McAllister's. The matter of an evening drive _a deux_ had been referred to Cicely's aunt. As a result the horse had stood hitched outside more than two hours only to be driven back to the livery, stable by the gloomy Al.

'Shucks, though! Al's a fish! Don't blame her!'

He walked stiffly in among the trees and shrubs of the old Dexter Smith place and mounted the rather imposing front steps.

That purchase of the Dexter Smith place was typical of Madame Watt at the time. She was riding high. She had money. Two acres of lawn, fine old trees, a great square house of Milwaukee brick, high spacious rooms with elaborately moulded plaster ceilings and a built-on conservatory and a barn that you could keep half a dozen carriages in! It was one of only four or five houses in Sunbury that the _Voice_ and the _Gleaner_ rejoiced to call 'mansions.' And it was the only one that could have been bought. The William B. Snows, like the Jenkinses and the de Casselles (I don't know if it has been explained before that the accepted local pronunciation was Dekasells,) lived in theirs. And even after the elder Dexter Smith died Mrs Smith would hardly have sold the place if the children hadn't nagged her into it. Young Dex wanted to go to New York. And at that it was understood that Madame Watt paid two prices.

2

A uniformed butler showed Henry into the room that he would have called the front parlour. Though there was another much like it across the wide hall. There was a 'back parlour,' with portières between. Out there, he knew, between centre table and fireplace, the Senator and Madame might even now be sitting.

He listened, on the edge of a huge plush and walnut chair, for the rustle of the Senator's paper, or Madame's deep, always startling voice.

There was no sound. Save that somewhere upstairs, far off, a door opened; then footsteps very faint. And silence again.

Henry looked, fighting down misgivings, at the heavily framed oil paintings on the wall. One, of a life-boat going out through mountainous waves to a wreck, he had always heard was remarkably fine. Fastened over the bow of the boat was a bit of real rope that had provoked critical controversy when the picture was first exhibited in Chicago.

He glanced down, discovered the box of chocolates on his knees, and hurriedly placed it on the corner of the inevitable centre table. Then he fussed nervously with his moustache; adjusted his tie, wondering if the stick pin should be higher; pulled down his cuffs; and sat up stiffly again.

'Maybe she ain't home,' he thought weakly. 'That fella said he'd see.'

'Maybe I oughta've asked if she'd be in.'

The silence deepened, spread, settled about him. He wished she would come down. There was danger, he knew, that his few painfully thought-out conversational openings would leave him. He would be an embarrassed, quite speechless young man. For he was as capable, even now, at twenty, almost at twenty-one, of speechlessness as of volubility. Either might happen to him, at any moment, from the smallest, least foreseeable of causes.

And there was something oppressive about the stillness of this cavernous old house with its sound-proof partitions and its distances. And that silent machine of a butler. It wasn't like calling at Martha Caldwell's, in the old days, where you could hear the Swedish cook crashing around in the kitchen and Martha moving around upstairs before she came down. Here you wouldn't so much as know there was a kitchen.

Then, suddenly, sharp as a blow out of the stillness came a series of sounds that froze the marrow in his bones, made him rigid on the edge of that plush chair, his lips parted, his eyes staring, wrestling with an impulse to dash out of the house; with another impulse to cough, or shout, or play the piano, in some mad way to announce himself, yet continuing to sit like a carved idol, in the grip of a paralysis of the faculties.

There is nothing more painful to the young than the occasional discovery, through the mask of social reticence, that the old have their weak or violent moments.

Gossip, yes! But gossip rests lightly and briefly in young ears. Henry had heard the Watts slyly ridiculed. There were whispers, of course. Madame's career as a French countess--well, naturally Sunbury wondered. And the long obscurity from which she had rescued Senator Watt raised questions about that very quiet little man. So often men in political life were tempted off the primly beaten track. And Henry, like the other young people, had grinned in awed delight over the tale that Madame swore at her servants. That was before he had so much as spoken to her niece. And it had little or no effect on his attitude toward Madame herself when he met her. She had at once taken her place in the compartment of his thoughts reserved from earliest memory for his elders, whose word was (at least in honest theory) law and to whom one looked up with diffidence and a genuine if somewhat automatic respect.

The first of the disturbing sounds was Madame's voice, far-off but ringing strong. Then a door opened--it must have been the dining-room door; not the wide one that opened into the great front hall, but the other, at the farther end of the 'back parlour.'

There was a brief lull. A voice could be heard, though--a man's voice, low-pitched, deprecatory.

Then Madame's again. And stranger noises. The man's voice cried out in quick protest; there was a rustle and then a crash like breaking china.

The Senator, hurrying a little, yet with a sort of dignity, walked out into the hall. Henry could see him, first between the portières as he left the room, then as he passed the hall door.

There was a rush and a torrent of passionately angry words from the other room. An object--it appeared to be a paper weight or ornament--came hurtling out into the hall. The Senator, who had apparently gone to the closet by the door for his hat and stick--for he came back into the hall with them--stepped back just in time to avoid being struck. The object fell on the stair, landing with the sound of solid metal.

'You come back here!' Madame's voice.

'I will not come back until you have had time to return to your senses,' replied the Senator. He looked very small. He was always stilted in speech; Humphrey had said that he talked like the _Congressional Record_. 'This is a disgraceful scene. If you have the slightest regard for my good name or your own you will at least make an effort to compose yourself. Some one might be at the door at this moment. You are a violent, ungoverned woman, and I am ashamed of you.'

'And you'--she was almost screaming now--'are the man who was glad to marry me.'

He ignored this. 'If any one asks for me, I shall be at the Sunbury Club.'

'Going to drink again, are you?'

'I think not.'

'If you do, you needn't come back. Do you hear? You needn't come back!'

He turned, and with a sort of strut went out the front door.

She started to follow. She did come as far as the portières. Henry had a glimpse of her, her face red and distorted.

She turned back then, and seemed to be picking up the room. He could hear sniffing and actually snorting as she moved about. There was a brief silence. Then she crossed the hall, a big imposing person--even in her tantrums she had presence--and went up the stairs, pausing on the landing to pick up the object she had thrown. Her solid footfalls died out on the thick carpets of the upper hall. A door opened, and slammed faintly shut.

Silence again.

Henry found that he was clutching the arms of the chair.

'I must relax,' he thought vacantly; and drew a slow deep breath, as he had been taught in a gymnasium class at the Y.M.C.A.

He brushed a hand across his eyes. Now that it was over, his temples were pounding hotly, his nerves aquiver.

It was incredible. Yet it had happened. Before his eyes. A vulgar brawl; a woman with a red face throwing things. And he was here in the house with her. He might have to try to talk with her.

He considered again the possibility of slipping out. But that butler had taken his name up. Cicely would be coming down any moment. Unless she knew.

Did she know? Had she heard? Possibly not.

Henry got slowly, indecisively up and wandered to the piano; stood leaning on it.

His eyes filled. All at once, in his mind's eye, he could see Cicely. Particularly the sensitive mouth. And the alert brown eyes. And the pretty way her eyebrows moved when she spoke or smiled or listened--always with a flattering attention--to what you were saying.

He brought a clenched fist down softly on the piano.

3

'Oh,' cried the voice of Cicely--'there you are! How nice of you to come!'

She was standing--for a moment--in the doorway.