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|It was late May in Sunbury, Illinois, and twenty minutes past eight in
the morning.
The spacious lawns and the wide strips of turf between sidewalk and
roadway in every avenue and street were lush with crowding young blades
of green. The maples, oaks, and elms were vivid with the exuberant youth
of the year.
Throughout the village, brisk young men, care-worn men of middle age,
a few elderly men were hurrying toward the old red-brick station whence
the eight-twenty-nine would shortly carry them into the dust and sweat
and smoke of a business day in Chicago. The swarms of sleepy-eyed
clerks, book-keepers, office boys and girl stenographers had gone in on
the seven-eleven and the seven-thirty-two.
Along Simpson Street the grocers, in their aprons, already had out
their sidewalk racks heaped with seasonable vegetables and fruits
(out-of-season delicacies had not then become commonplaces of life in
Sunbury; strawberries appeared when the local berries were ripe,
not sooner). The two butcher shops were decorated with red and buff
carcasses hung in rows. A whistling, coatless youth had just swept out
Donovan's drug store and was wiping off the marble counter before the
marble and glass soda fountain. Through the windows of the Sunbury
National Bank Alfred Knight could be seen filling the inkwells and
putting out fresh blotters and pens. The neat little restaurant known as
'Stanley's' (the Stanleys were a respectable coloured couple) was
still nearly full of men who ate ham and eggs, pounded beefsteak, fried
potatoes, and buckwheat cakes, and drank huge cups of gray-brown coffee;
with, at the rear tables, two or three family groups. And from numerous
boarding-houses and dormitories in the northern section of the overgrown
village students of both sexes were converging on the oak-shaded campus
by the lake.
All of Sunbury appeared to be up and about the business of the day; all,
perhaps, except Henry Calverly, 3rd, who sat, dressed except for his
coat, heavy-eyed, a hair brush in either hand, hands resting limp
on knees, on the edge of his narrow iron bed. This, in Mrs Wilcox's
boardinghouse in Douglass Street, one block south of Simpson; top floor.
If the present reader has, by chance, had earlier acquaintance with
Henry, it should be explained that he is now to be pictured not as a
youth of eighteen going on nineteen but as a young man of twenty going
on twenty-one.
That figure, twenty-one, of significance in the secret thoughts of any
growing boy, was of peculiar, stirring significance to the sensitive,
imaginative Henry. It marked the beginning of what is sometimes termed
Life. It suggested alarming but interesting responsibilities. On that
day, beginning with the stroke of the midnight hour, guardians ceased
to function and independence set in. One was a citizen. One voted. In
Henry's case, the crowning symbol of manhood would be deferred a year,
as Election Day was to fall on the fifth of November and his birthday
was the seventh; but that so trivial a mere fact bore small weight in
the face of potential citizenship might have been indicated by the faint
blonde fringe along his upper lip. This fringe was a new venture. He
stroked it much of the time, and stole glances at it in mirrors. He
could twist it up a little at the ends.
The rest of him indicated a taste that was hardly bent on the
inexpensive as such. His duck trousers (this was the middle nineties)
were smartly creased and rustled with starch. His white canvas shoes
were not 'sneakers' but had heavy soles and half-heels of red rubber.
His coat, lying now across the iron tube that marked the foot of the
bed, was a double-breasted blue serge, unlined, well-tailored. The hat,
hung on a mirror post above the 'golden oak' bureau, was of creamy white
felt. He had given up spectacles for nose glasses with a black silk
cord.
Nearly two years earlier his mother had died. He had lived on, caught in
a drift of time and circumstance, keeping, without any particular plan,
this little room with its sloping ceiling. The price was an item, of
course--six dollars a week for room and board. You couldn't do better
in Sunbury, even then. Memories haunted the place, naturally enough.
Loneliness had dwelt close with him.
His mother's picture, in a silver frame, stood at the right of the
pincushion; at the left, in hammered brass ['repoussé work') was a
'cabinet size' photograph of Martha Caldwell. A woven-wire rack on the
wall held half a hundred snapshots of girls, boys, and groups, in about
a third of which figured Martha's smiling, sensible, pleasantly freckled
face. A guitar in an old green bag leaned against the wall behind his
mother's old trunk; it had not been out of the bag in more than a year.
An assortment of neck-ties hung over the gas-jet by the bureau. Tacked
about on the wall were six or eight copies of Gibson girls; rather good
copies, barringva certain stiffness of line. On the seat in the one
dormer window reposed two cushions, one covered with college pennants,
the other with cigar bands laboriously cross-stitched together; both
from, the hands of Martha.
Henry's little bookcase was not uninteresting. It contained the
following books: Daily Strength for Daily Needs, Browning, Trollope,
and Hawthorne in sets, Sonnets, from the Portuguese, Words often
Mispronounced, Longfellow, complete in one fat volume. Red Line Edition,
and Six Thousand Puzzles, all of which had been his mother's; Green's
History of the English People, Boswell's Johnson, both largely uncut,
and the Discourses of Epictetus, which three had come as Christmas or
birthday gifts; and exactly one volume, a work by an obscure author
(who was pictured in the frontispiece with a bristling moustache and
intensely knit brows) entitled Will Power and Self Mastery, which
offered the only clue as to Henry's own taste in book buying.
His taste in reading was another matter. The novels and romances he had
devoured during certain periods of his teens had mostly come from the
Sunbury Free Public Library. Lately, however, apart from thrilling
moments with The Prisoner of Zenda, Under the Red Rose, and The Princess
Aline, he had found difficulty in reading at all. Something was stirring
within him, something restlessly positive, an impulse to give out rather
than take in. Though he had, at intervals, lunged with determination
at the Green and the Boswell. This effort, indeed, had been repeated so
many times that he occasionally caught himself speaking of these authors
as if he had read them exhaustively.
The bottom drawer of the bureau was a third full of unfinished
manuscripts--attempts at novels, short stories, poems, plays--each
faithfully reflecting its immediate source of inspiration. There were
paragraphs that might have been written by a little Dickens; there
were thinly diluted specimens of Dumas, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Richard
Harding Davis, Thackeray. The rest was all Kipling, prose and verse.
Everybody was writing Kipling then.
A step sounded in the hall. The knob turned softly; the door opened a
little way; and the thinnish, moderately pretty face of Mamie Wilcox
appeared--pale blue eyes with the beginnings of hollows beneath them,
fair skin, straight hay-coloured hair, wisps of it straying down across
forehead and cheek, thin nose, soft but rather sulky mouth. She was
probably twenty-two or twenty-three at this time.
All she said was, 'Oh!'--very low.
'Wonder you wouldn't knock!' said he.
'Wonder you wouldn't get up before noon!' she responded smartly, but
still in that cautious voice; then added, 'Here, I'll leave the towels,
and come back.' And she slipped into the room, a heavier and more
shapely figure of a girl than was suggested by the face, a girl in a
full-length gingham apron and little shoes with unexpectedly high heels;
not 'French' heels, but the sloping style known then as 'military.'
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Henry's colour was rising a little. He cleared his throat, and said,
mumbling, 'Leave anything you like.'
'I'll do just that,'--she turned, with a flirt of her apron and stood,
between washstand and door, surveying him--'what I like, and nothing
more.'... Her eyes wandered now from him to the picture at the left of
the pincushion, then to the snapshots on the wall, and she smiled, very
self-contained, very knowing, with the expression that the young call
'sarcastic.' The adjective came to mind. Henry's colour was mounting
higher.
'Pretty snappy to-day, ain't we?' said he.
'Yes, when we're snapped at,' said she.
There was a silence that ran on into seconds and tens of seconds.
Then, acting on an impulse of astonishing suddenness, he sprang toward
her.
With almost equal agility she stepped away. But he caught one hand.
She had the door-knob in her other hand. She drew the door open, then,
indecisively, pushed it nearly to.
'Be careful!' she whispered. 'They'll hear!'
She made a small effort to free her hand. For a moment they stood
tugging at each other.
When Henry spoke, in an effort to appear the off-hand man of the world
he assuredly was not, his voice sounded weak and husky.
'Whew--strong!'
'Suppose I slapped.'
'Slap all you like.'
'What would Martha Caldwell say?'
There was a gloomy sort of anger on Henry's red face. He jerked her
violently toward him.
'Stop! You're hurting my wrist!' With which she yielded a little.
He found himself about to take her in his arms. He heard her
whispering--'For Heaven's sake be careful! They'll surely hear!'
He was most unhappy. He pushed her roughly away, and rushed to the
window.,
He knew from the silence that she was lingering. He hated her. And
himself.