Читать книгу Henry Is Twenty - Samuel Merwin - Страница 7

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The Voice office occupied what had once been a shop, opposite the hotel. The show window of plate glass now displayed the splintery rear panels of old Mr Boice's rolltop desk, that was heaped, on top, with back numbers of the Voice, the Inter Ocean and the Congressional Record, and a pile of inky zinc etchings mounted on wood blocks.

Within, back of a railing, were Humphrey Weaver's desk and Henry Calverly's table.

Humphrey was tall, rather thin and angular, with a long face, long nose, long chin, swarthy complexion, and quick, quizzical brown eyes with innumerable fine wrinkles about them. When he smiled, his whole face seemed to wrinkle back, displaying many large teeth in a cavernous mouth.

Humphrey might have been twenty-five or six. He was a reticent young man, with no girl or women friends that one ever saw, a fondness for the old corn-cob that he was always scraping, filling, or smoking, and a secret passion for the lesser known laws of physics. He lived alone, in a barn back of the old Parmenter place. He had divided the upper story into living and sleeping rooms, and put in hardwood floors and simple furniture and a piano. Downstairs, in what he called his shop, were lathes, a workbench, innumerable wood-and-metal working tools, a dozen or more of heavy metal wheels set, at right angles, in circular frames, and several odd little round machines suspended from the ceiling at the ends of twisted cords. In one corner stood a number of box kites, very large ones. And there were large planes of silk on spruce frames. He was an alumnus of the local university, but had made few friends, and had never been known in the town. Henry hadn't heard of him before the previous year, when he had taken the desk in the Voice office.

'Say, Hen,'—Henry looked up from his copy paper—; 'Mrs Henderson looked in a few minutes ago, and left a programme and a list of guests for her show to-night. She wants to be sure and have you there. You can do it, can't you?'

Henry nodded listlessly.

'It seems there's to be a contralto, too—somebody that's visiting her. She—Sister Henderson—appears to take you rather seriously, my boy. Wants you particularly to hear the new girl. One Corinne Doag. We,'—Humphrey smoked meditatively, then finished his sentence—'we talked you over, the lady and I. I promised you'd come.'

At noon, the editorial staff of two lunched at Stanley's.

'Wha'd you and Mrs Henderson say about me?' asked Henry, over the pie.

'She says,' remarked Humphrey, the wrinkles multiplying about his eyes, 'that you have temperament. She thinks it's a shame.'

'What's a shame?' muttered Henry.

'Whatever has happened to you. I told her you were the steadiest boy I ever knew. Don't drink, smoke, or flirt. I didn't add that you enter every cent you spend in that little red book; but I've seen you doing it and been impressed. But I mentioned that you're the most conscientious reporter I ever saw. That started her. It seems that you're nothing of the sort. My boy, she set you before me in a new light. You begin to appear complex and interesting.'

Still muttering, Henry said, 'Nothing so very interesting about me.'

'It seems that you put on an opera here—directed it, or sang it, or something. Before my time.'

'That was Iolanthe,' said Henry, with a momentarily complacent memory.

'And you sang—all over the place, apparently. Why don't you sing now?'

'It's too,'—Henry was mumbling, flushing, and groping for a word—'too physical.'

Then, with a sudden movement that gave Humphrey a little start, the boy leaned over the table, pulled at his moustache, and asked, gloomily: 'Listen! Do you think a man can change his nature?'

Humphrey considered this without a smile. 'I don't see exactly how, Hen.'

'I mean if he's been heedless and reckless—oh, you know, girls, debts, everything. Just crazy, sorta.'

'Well, I suppose a man can reform. Were you a very bad lot?' The wrinkled smile was reassuring.

'That depends on what you—I wasn't exactly sporty, but—oh, you don't know the trouble I've had, Humphrey. Then my mother died, and I hadn't been half-decent to her, and I was left alone, and my uncle had to pay my debts out of the principal—it was hundreds of dollars——'

His voice died out.

There was an element of pathos in the picture before him that Humphrey recognised with some sympathy—the gloomy lad of twenty, with that absurd little moustache that he couldn't let alone. After all, he had been rather put to it. It began to appear that he had suppressed himself without mercy. There would doubtless be reactions. Perhaps explosions.

Henry went on:—

'I don't know what's happened to me. I don't feel right about things. I'—he hesitated, glanced up, then down, and his ears reddened—'I've been going with Martha Caldwell, you know. For a long time.'

Humphrey nodded.

'Mondays and Thursdays I go over there, and other times. I don't seem to want to go any more. But I get mixed up about it. I—I don't want them to say I'm fickle. They used to say it.'

'You've evidently got gifts,' observed Humphrey, as if thinking aloud. 'You've got some fire in you. The trouble with you now, of course, is that you're stale.' Humphrey deliberately considered the situation, then remarked: 'You asked me if a man can change his nature. I begin to see now. You've been trying to do that to yourself, for quite a while.'

Henry nodded.

'Well, I suppose you'll find that you can't do it. Not quite that. The fire that's in you isn't going to stop burning just because you tell it to.'

'But what's a fellow to do?'

'I don't know. Just stick along, I suppose, gradually build up experience until you find work you can let yourself go in. Some way, of course, you've got to let yourself go, sooner or later.'

Henry, his eyes nervously alert now, his slim young body tense, was drawing jerkily with his fork on the coarse table-cloth.

'Yes,' he broke out, with the huskiness in his voice that came when his emotions pressed—'yes, but what if you can't let yourself go without letting everything go? What if the fire bums you!'

Humphrey found it difficult to frame a reply. He got no further, this as they were leaving the restaurant, than to say, 'Of course, one man can't advise another.'