'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.