'Haven't time. Got to get right back to the office.'
'Well--listen, meet me to-night. I can get out by eight. It's pretty
important. Maybe serious.'
'Is it---did anybody----'
She nodded. 'Mrs MacPherson. She was right in her door when I came out
of your room.'
'Did she say anything?'
'She looked a lot.'
'Well, say--I'll see you for a few minutes to-night. Say about eight.'
This was best. It would be dark, or near it. He simply mustn't be seen
strolling with Mamie Wilcox along Filbert Avenue in broad daylight.
'What do you say to Douglass Street and the Lake Shore Drive?'
'All right. Tell you what--bring a tandem along and take me for a ride.'
'Oh, I can't.' But his will was weak. 'Got to report a concert. I don't
know, though. I s'pose I could get around at half-past nine' or ten and
hear the last numbers.'
He had often done this. Besides, he could probably manage it earlier. He
knew he could rent a tandem at Murphy's cigar store down by the tracks.
A quite wild, wholly fascinating stir of adventure was warming his
breast and bringing that huskiness into his voice. He was letting go.
He felt daring and a little mad. He hadn't realised, before to-day, that
Mamie had such a lure about her.
Before returning to the office he got his bank-book and brazenly drew
from the bank, savings department, his entire account, amounting to ten
dollars forty-six cents. He also bespoke the tandem.
These were the great days of bicycling. The first highwheeled, rattling
horseless carriage was not to appear in the streets of Sunbury for a
year or two yet. Bicycle clubs flourished. Memorial Day each year (they
called it Decoration Day) was a mad rush of excursion and road races.
Every Sunday witnessed a haggard-eyed humpbacked horde of 'Scorchers' in
knickerbockers or woollen tights. Many of the young men one met on train
and street wore medals with a suspended chain of gold bars, one for each
'century run.'
And these were the first great days of the bloomer girl. She was
legion. Sometimes her bloomers were bloomers, sometimes they were
knickerbockers, sometimes little more than the tights of the racing
breed. She was dusty, sweaty, loud. She was never the sort of girl you
knew; but always appeared from the swarming, dingy back districts of the
city. Sometimes she rode a single wheel, sometimes tandem with some
male of the humpbacked breed and of the heavily muscled legs and the
grotesquely curved handle bars. The bloomer girl was looked at askance
by the well-bred folk of the shaded suburbs. Ministers thumped pulpits
and harangued half-empty pews regarding this final moral, racial
disaster while she rode dustily by the very doors.
Henry, as he pedalled the long machine through back streets to the
rendezvous, was glad that the twilight was falling fast. In his breast
pocket were copy paper and pencils, in an outer pocket his little
olive-green book. His white trousers were caught about the ankles with
steel dips.
Mamie kept him waiting. He hid both himself and the wheel in the shadows
of the tall lilac bushes in the little village park.
She came at length, said 'Hello!' and with a little deft unhooking,
coolly stepped out of her skirt, rolled up that garment, thrust it under
a bush, and stood before him in the sort of wheeling costume rarely seen
in Sunbury save on Saturdays and Sundays when the Chicago crowds were
pouring through.
Henry stood motionless, silent, in the dusk.
'Well,' said she, smartly, 'are we riding?'
Without a word he wheeled out the bicycle and they rolled away.
She was very close, there before him. She bent over the handle bars like
an old-timer, and pedalled with something more than the abandon of a
boy. It was going to be hard to talk to her... If he could only blot
this day out of his life. 'She started it,' he thought fiercely, staring
out ahead over her rhythmically moving shoulder. 'I never asked her to
come in!'
'I didn't know you rode a wheel,' said he, after a time, dismally.
'I ride Sundays with the boys from Pennyweather Point. But you needn't
tell that at home.'
'I'm not telling anything at home,' muttered Henry. Then she flung back
at him the one word.
'Surprised?'
'Well--why, sorta.'
'You thought I was satisfied to do the room work and wash dishes, I
suppose!'
'I don't know as I thought anything.'
'What's the matter, anyway? Scared at my bloomers?'
'That's what you call'em, is it?'
'I must say you're grand company.'
He made no reply.
They pedalled past the university buildings, the athletic field, the
lighthouse, up a grade between groves of oak, out along the brink of a
clay bluff overlooking the steely dark lake--horizonless, still, a light
or two twinkling far out.
'Shall we go to Hoffman's?' she asked.
'I don't care where we go,' said he.
6
_The Weekly Voice of Sunbury_ was put to press every Friday evening, was
printed during that night, and appeared in the first mail on Saturday
mornings.
Friday, therefore, was the one distractingly busy day for Humphrey
Weaver. And it was natural enough that he should snatch at Henry's
pencilled report of the musicale at Mrs Henderson's with the briefest
word of greeting, and give his whole mind, blue copy-editing pencil
posed in air, to reading it. But he did note that the boy looked rather
haggard, as if he hadn't slept much. He heard his mumbled remark that
he had been over at the public library, writing the thing; and perhaps
wondered mildly and momentarily why the boy should be writing at the
library and not at home, and why he should speak of the fact at all.
And now and again during the day he was aware of Henry, pale, dog-eyed,
inclined to hang about as if confidences were trembling on his tongue.
And he was carrying a little olive-green book around; drew it from
his pocket every now and then and read or turned the pages with an
ostentatious air of concentration, as if he wanted to be noticed.
Humphrey decided to ask him what the trouble was; later, when the paper
was put away. When he might have spoken, old man Boice was there, at his
desk. And Humphrey never got out to meals on Fridays. Henry got all his
work in on time: the 'Real Estate Notes' for the week and the last items
for 'Along Simpson Street.'
The report of the musicale would have brought a smile or two on another
day. There was nearly a column of it. Henry had apparently been deeply
moved by the singing of Anne Mayer Stelton. He dwelt on the 'velvet
suavity' of her legato passages, her firmness of attack and the
'delicate lace work of her colourature.' 'Mme. Stelton's art,' he wrote,
'has deepened and broadened appreciably since she last appeared in
Sunbury. Always gifted with a splendid singing organ, always charming in
personality and profoundly rhythmically musical in temperament, she now
has added a superstructure of technical authority, which gives to each
passage, whether bravura or pianissimo, a quality and distinction seldom
heard in this country. Miss Corinne Doag also added immeasurably to
the pleasure of the select audience by singing a group of songs. Miss
Corinne Doag has a contralto voice of fine _verve_ and _timbre_. She is
a guest of Mrs Henderson, who herself accompanied delightfully. Among
those present were:--'
Henry's writing always startled you a little. Words fairly flowed
through his pencil, long words, striking words. He had the word sense;
this when writing. In speech he remained just about where he had been
all through his teens, loose of diction, slurring and eliding and using
slang as did most of the Middle-Westerners among whom he had always
lived, and, like them, swallowing his tongue down his throat.
Humphrey initialed the copy, tossed it into the devil's basket, turned
to a pile of proofs, paused as if recollecting something, picked up the
copy again, glanced rapidly through it, and turned on his assistant.
'Look here, Hen,' he remarked, 'you don't tell what they sang, either of
'em. Or who _were_ among those present.'
Henry was reading his little book at the moment, and fumbling at his
moustache. A mournful object.
He turned now, with a start, and stared, wide-eyed, at Humphrey. His
lips parted, but he didn't speak. A touch of colour appeared in his
cheeks.
Then, as abruptly, he went limp in his chair.
'I thought she left a list here and a programme,' he said, eyes now on
the floor.
Humphrey's practised eye ran swiftly over the double row of pigeonholes
before him. 'Right you are!' he exclaimed.
It was a quarter past eleven that night when Humphrey scrawled his last
'O.K.'; stretched out his long form in his swivel chair; yawned; said,
'Well, _that's_ done, thank God!'; and hummed and tapped out on his bare
desk the refrain of a current song:--
'But you'd look sweet