He crept through the dim shop, among Humphrey's lathes, belts, benches
of tools, big kites and rows of steel wheels mounted in frames. There
were large planes, too, parts of the gliders Humphrey had been puttering
with for a long time. Three years, he had once said.
Henry lingered on the stairs and looked about the ghostly rooms. Beams
of moonlight came in through the windows and touched this and that
machine. He felt himself attuned to all the trouble, the disaster, in
the universe. Life was a tragic disappointment. Nothing ever came right.
People didn't succeed; they struggled and struggled to breast a mighty,
tireless current that swept them ever backward.
Poor old Hump! He had put money into this shop. All the little he had;
or nearly all. And into the technical library that lined his bedroom
walls upstairs. His daily work at the _Voice_ office was just a grind,
to keep body and soul together while the experiments were working out.
Hump was patient.
'Until I moved in here,' Henry thought, with a disturbingly passive
sort of' bitterness, 'and brought girls and things. He doesn't have his
nights and Sundays for work any more. Hump could do big things, too.'
He went on up the stairs and switched on the lights in the living-room.
He caught sight of his face in a mirror. It was white.
There was a look of strain about the eyes. The little moustache, turned
up at the ends, mocked him.
'I'll shave it off,' he said aloud.
He even got out his razor and began nervously stropping it.
He was alarmed to discover that his control of his hands was none too
good. They moved more quickly than he meant them to, and in jerks.
Too, the notion of shaving his moustache struck him weakness, an impulse
to be resisted. Too much like retreating. Subtly like that.
He put the razor back in its drawer.
In the centre of the living-room rug, standing there, stiffly, he
said:--
'I'll face them. I'll go down fighting. They shan't say I surrendered.'
He walked round and round the room.
He had never in his life felt anything like this jerky nervousness. A
restlessness that wouldn't permit him so much as to sit down.
While in the _Gleaner_ office he had hardly been aware of McGibbon. He
certainly hadn't listened to him.
But now, like a blow, everything McGibbon had said came to him. Every
syllable. Suddenly he could see the man, towering ever him, pounding
his desk. Talking--talking--full of fresh hopes while the world crumbled
around him. More disaster! It was the buzzing song of the old globe as
it spun endlessly on its axis. Disaster!... The advertisers had at last
combined against the paper. Old Weston had called McGibbon's note. That
must have taken about the last of Henry's thousand. They were broke.
His hand brushed his coat pocket. It bulged with copy paper. He must
have thrust it back there absently, at the office.
He drew it out and gazed at it.
It was curious; he seemed to see it as a printed page, with a title at
the top, and his name. He couldn't see what the title was. Yet it was
there, and it was good.
His restlessness grew. Again he walked round and round the room. There
was a glow in his breast. Something that burned and fired his nerves and
drove him as one is driven in a dream. Either he must rush outdoors and
wander at a feverish pace around the town and up the lake shore--walk
all night--or he must sit down and write.
He sat down. Picked up an atlas of Humphrey's and wrote on his lap. And
he wrote, from the beginning, as he would have walked had he gone out,
in a fever of energy, gripping the pencil tightly, holding his knees up
a little, heels off the floor. The colour reappeared about his forehead
and temples, then on his cheeks.
When Humphrey came in, after midnight, he was in just this posture,
writing at a desperate rate. The floor all about him was strewn with
sheets of paper. One or two had drifted off to the centre of the
room. He didn't hear his friend come up the stairs.' When he saw him,
standing, looking down, something puzzled, he cried out excitedly':--
'Don't Hump!'