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|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 the Caldwell girl.
Lately she had seen him with that strikingly pretty but, she felt,
rather 'physical' young singer who was visiting the gifted but
whispered-about Mrs Arthur V. Henderson, of Lower Chestnut Avenue. Name
of Doge, or Doag, or something like that.
Henry himself had been whispered about. Very recently. He had been
seen at Hoffmann's Garden, up the shore, with a vulgar young woman in
extremely tight bloomers. Of the working girl type. Had her out on a
tandem. Drinking beer.
So it was, unable to forget those secretly stirring _Iolanthe_ days,
that Miss Wombast had looked about among her book types for a key to
Henry, but without success. He didn't appear to be in De Maupassant. Nor
in Balzac. In Meredith and James there was no one who said 'Yeah' and
'Gotta' and spoke with the crude if honest throat 'r' of the Middle West
and went with nice girls and vulgar girls and carried that silly cane
and wore the sillier moustache; who had, or had had, gifts of creation
and command, yet now, month in, month out, hung about Donovan's soda
fountain; who never smoked and, apart from the Hoffmann's Garden
incident, wasn't known to drink; and who, when you faced him, despite
the massed evidence, gave out an impression of earnest endeavour. Even
of moral purpose.
Had she known him better Miss Wombast would have found herself the more
puzzled. For Miss Wombast, despite her rather complicated reading,
still clung in some measure to the moralistic teachings of her youth,
believing that people either had what she thought of as character or
else didn't have it, that people were either industrious or lazy, bright
or stupid, vulgar or nice. Therefore the fact that Henry, while still
wrecking his stomach with fountain drinks and (a recently acquired
habit) with lemon meringue pie between meals, had not touched candy for
two years--not a chocolate cream, not even a gum drop!--and this by
sheer force of character, would have been confusing.
And to read his thoughts, as he stood there before her desk, would have
carried her confusion on into bewilderment.
Mostly these thoughts had to do with money, and bordered on the
desperate. Tentative little schemes for getting money--even a few
dollars--were forming and dissolving rapidly in his mind.
He was concerned because his sudden little flirtation with Corinne Doag,
after a flashing start, had lost its glow. Only the preceding evening.
He hadn't held her interest. The thrill had gone. Which plunged him into
moods and brought to his always unruly tongue the sarcastic words
that made matters worse. He was lunching down there to-day--he and
Humphrey--and dreaded it, with moments of a rather futile, flickering
hope. Deep intuition informed him that the one sure solution was money.
You couldn't get on with a girl without it. Just about so far, then
things dragged. And this, of course, brought him around the circle, back
to the main topic.
He was thinking about his clothes. They, at least, should move Corinne.
Along with the moustache, the cane, the cord on his glasses. He didn't
see how people could help being a little impressed. Miss Wombast, even,
who didn't matter. It seemed to him that she _was_ impressed.
He was thinking about Martha Caldwell., She was pretty frankly going
with James B. Merchant, Jr., now. Henry was jealous of James B.
Merchant, Jr. And about Martha his thoughts hovered with a tinge of
romantic sadness. He would like her to see him to-day, in these clothes,
with his moustache and cane.
He was wondering, with the dread that the prospect of mental effort
always roused in him, how on earth he was ever to write three whole
columns about the Annual Business Men's Picnic of the preceding
afternoon. Describing in humorous yet friendly detail the three-legged
race, the ball game between the fats and the leans, the dinner in the
grove, the concert by Foote's full band of twenty pieces, the purse
given to Charlie Waterhouse as the most popular man on Simpson Street.
He had a thick wad of notes up at the rooms, but his heart was not in
the laborious task of expanding them. He knew precisely what old
man Boice expected of him--plenty of 'personal mention' for all the
advertisers, giving space for space. Each day that he put it off
would make the task harder. If he didn't have the complete story in by
Thursday night, Humphrey would skin him alive; yet here it was Wednesday
morning, and he was planning to spend as much of the day as possible
with the increasingly unresponsive Corinne. Life was difficult!
He was aware of a morbid craving in his digestive tract. He decided to
get an ice-cream soda on the way back to the office. He would have liked
about half a pound of chocolate creams. The Italian kind, with all the
sweet in the white part. But here character intervened.
A corner of his mind dwelt unceasingly on queer difficult feelings that
came. These had flared out in the unpleasant incident of Mamie Wilcox
and the tandem; and again in the present flirtation with Corinne. In a
way that he found perplexing, this stir of emotion was related to
his gifts. He couldn't let one go without the other. There had been
moments--in the old days--when a feeling of power had surged through
him. It was a wonderful, irresistible feeling. Riding that wave, he
was equal to anything. But it had frightened him. The memory of it
frightened him now. He had put _Iolanthe_ through, it was true, but he
had also nearly eloped with Ernestine Lambert. He had completely lost
his head--debts, everything!
Yes, it was as well that Miss Wombast couldn't read his thoughts. She
wouldn't have known how to interpret them. She hadn't the capacity to
understand the wide swift stream of feeling down which an imaginative
boy floats all but rudderless into manhood. She couldn't know of his
pitifully inadequate little attempts to shape a course, to catch this
breeze and that, even to square around and breast the current of life.