It was two o’clock in the afternoon. Simpson Street was quiet after the brisk business of the morning. The air quivered up from the pavement in the still heat. The occasional people about the street moved slowly. The collars of the few visible tradesmen were soft rags around their necks and they mopped red faces with saturated handkerchiefs. The morning breeze had died; the afternoon breeze would drift in at four o’clock or so; until which time Sunbury ladies took their naps and Sunbury business men dozed at their desks. Saturday closing had not made much headway at this period, though the still novel game of golf was beginning to work its mighty change in small-town life.

Through this calm scene, absorbed in their affairs, unaware of the heat, strode Humphrey and Henry – down past the long hotel veranda, where the yellow rocking chairs stood in endless empty rows, past Swanson’s and Donovan’s and Jackson’s book store to the meat market and then, rapidly, up the long stairway.

They found McGibbon with his long legs stretched out under his desk, hands deep in pockets, thin face lined and weary, but eyes nervously bright as always. He was in his shirt-sleeves, of course. His drab brown hair seemed a little longer and even more ragged than usual where it met his wilted collar.

But he grinned at them, and waved a long hand.

‘My God!’ he cried, ‘but it’s good to see a human face. Look!’ His hand swept around, indicating the dusty, deserted desks and the open press-room door. It was still out there; not a man hummed or whistled as he clicked type into his stick, not one of the four job presses rumbled out its cheerful drone of industry.

‘Rats all gone!’ McGibbon added. ‘But the Caliph was up again.’

‘Yes,’ Henry, who found himself suddenly and deeply moved, breathed softly, ‘we know.’

‘Came up a hundred. He’ll pay six hundred now. For all this. An actual investment of more’n four thousand.’ The hand waved again. ‘It’s amusing. He doesn’t know I’m on to him. You see the old fox’s been nosing around to get up a petition to throw me into involuntary bankruptcy, but he can’t find any creditors. Has to be five hundred dollars, you know.’

‘What did you say to him?’ asked Humphrey, thoughtfully.

‘Showed him out. Second time to-day. It was a hard climb for him, too. He did puff some.’

Humphrey slowly drew a large envelope from an inner pocket and laid it on the table at his elbow.

McGibbon eyed it alertly.

‘Here!’ he said, his hand moving up toward the row of four or five cigars that projected from a vest pocket, ‘smoke up, you fellows.’

Henry shook his head. Humphrey drew out his pipe; then raised his head, and said quietly: —

‘Listen!’

There came the unmistakable sound of heavy feet on the stairs. Steadily, step by step, a slowly moving body mounted.

Then, framed in the doorway, stood the huge bulk of Norton P. Boice, breathless, red, and wet of face, his old straw hat pushed back, his yellowish-white, wavy beard covering his necktie and the upper part of his roundly protruding, slightly spotted vest, against which the heavy watch chain with its dangling fraternal insignia stood out prominently.

Boice’s eyes, nearly expressionless, finally settled on Humphrey.

‘What are you doing here?’ he asked, between puffs.

Humphrey’s only reply was a slight impatient gesture.

‘You oughta be at your desk.’

Then he came into the room. Of the three men seated there Humphrey was the only one who knew by certain small external signs, that the Caliph of Simpson Street was blazing with wrath. For here was his own hired lieutenant hobnobbing with the boy whose agile, irresponsible pen had made him the laughing stock of the township and with the intemperate rival who had first attacked and then defied him. And then he had just climbed the stairs for the third and what he meant to be the last time.

He came straight to business.

‘Have you decided to accept my offer?’

‘Sit down,’ said McGibbon, pushing a chair over with his foot.

Boice ignored this final bit of insolence.

‘Have you decided to accept my offer?’

‘Well’ – McGibbon shrugged; spread out his hands – ‘I’ve decided nothing, but as it looks now I may find myself forced to accept it.’

‘Then I suggest that you accept it now.’

‘Well – ’ the hands went out again.

‘Wait a moment,’ said Humphrey.

‘I think you had better go back to the office,’ Boice broke in.

‘Shortly. I have no intention of leaving you in the lurch, Mr Boice. But first I have business here.’

‘You have business!’

‘Yes.’ Humphrey opened the large envelope. ‘Here, McGibbon, is your note to Henry for one thousand dollars, due in November.’

Before their eyes, deliberately, he tore it up, leaned over McGibbon’s legs with an, ‘I beg your pardon!’ and dropped the pieces in the waste-basket. Next he produced a folded document engraved in green and red ink. ‘Here,’ he concluded, ‘is a four per cent, railway bond that stands to-day at a hundred two and a quarter in the market. That’s our price for the Gleaner.’

McGibbon’s nervous eyes followed the movements of Humphrey’s hands as if fascinated. During the hush that followed he sat motionless, chin on breast. Then, slowly, he drew in his legs, straightened up, reached for the bond, turned it over, opened it and ran his eye over the coupons, looked up and remarked: —

‘The paper’s yours.’

‘Then, Mr Boice,’ said Humphrey, ‘the next issue of the Gleaner will be published by Weaver and Calverly, and the stories you object to will run their course.’

But Mr Boice, creaking deliberately over the floor, was just disappearing through the doorway.’

9

The sunlight was streaming in through the living-room of the barn back of the old Parmenter place. Outside the maple leaves were rustling gently. Through the quiet air came the slow booming of the First Presbyterian bell across the block. From greater distances came the higher pitched bell of the Baptist Church, down on Filbert Avenue, and the faint note from the Second Presbyterian over on the West Side, across the tracks.

Humphrey had made coffee and toast. They sat at an end of the centre table. Humphrey in bath-robe and slippers, Henry fully dressed in his blue serge suit, neat silk four-in-hand tie, stiff white collar and carefully polished shoes.

‘Where are you going with all that?’ Humphrey asked.

Henry hesitated; flushed a little.

‘To church,’ he finally replied.

Humphrey’s surprise was real. There had been a time, before they came to know each other, when the boy had sung bass in the quartet at the Second Presbyterian. But since that period he had not been a church-goer. Henry had been quiet all evening, and now this morning. He seemed all boxed up within himself. Preoccupied. As if the triumph over old Boice had merely opened up the way to new responsibilities. Which, for that matter, was just what it had done – done to both of them. Humphrey, not being given to prying, would have let the subject drop here, had not Henry surprised him by breaking hotly forth into words.

‘It’s my big fight, Hump!’ he was saying now. ‘Don’t you see! This town. All they say. Look here!’ He laid a rumpled bit of paper on the table. As if he had been holding it ready in his hand.’

‘Oh, that letter,’ said Humphrey.

‘Yes. It’s what I’ve got to fight. And I’ve got to win. Don’t you see?’

‘Yes,’ Humphrey replied gravely, ‘I see.’

‘I think,’ said Henry, ‘it’s being in love that’s going to help me. We’ve got to hold our heads up, you and I. Build the Gleaner into a real property. Win confidence. And there mustn’t be any doubt. The way we step out and fight, you know. I’ve got to stand with you.’

Humphrey’s eyes strayed to the sunlit window. He suppressed a little sigh.

‘This note’s right enough, in a way,’ Henry went on. ‘It wouldn’t be fair to compromise her.’ He leaned earnestly over the table. ‘It’s really a hopeless love. I know that, Hump. But it isn’t like the others.’ It makes me feel ashamed of them. All of them. I’ve got to show her, or at least show myself, that it’s this love that has made a man of me. Without asking anything, you know.’

Humphrey listened in silence as the talk ran on. The boy was changing, no question about that. Even back of the romantic strain that was colouring his attitude, the suggestion of pose in it, there was real evidence of this change. At least his fighting blood was up. And he was taking punishment.

Sitting there sipping his coffee, Humphrey, half listening, soberly considered his younger friend. Henry was distinctly odd, a square peg in a round world. He was capable of curiously outrageous acts, yet most of them seemed to arise from a downright inability to sense the common attitude, to feel with his fellows. He could be heedless, neglectful, self-centred; but Humphrey had never found meanness or unkindness in him. And he was capable of a passionate generosity. He had, indeed, for Humphrey, the fascination that an erratic and ingenuous but gifted person often exerts on older, steadier natures. You could be angry at him; but you couldn’t get over the feeling that you had to take care of him. And it always seemed, even when he was out and out exasperating, that the thing that was the matter with him was the very quality that underlay his astonishing gifts; that he was really different from others; the difference ran all through, from his unexpected, rather self-centred ways of acting and reacting clear up to the fact that he could write what other people couldn’t write. ‘If they could,’ thought Humphrey now, shrewdly, ‘very likely they’d be different too.’ Take this business of dressing up like a born suburbanite and going to church. It was something of a romantic gesture, But that wasn’t all it was. The fight was real, whatever unexpected things it might lead him to do from day to day.

Herbert de Casselles, wooden-faced, dressed impeccably in frock coat, heavy ‘Ascot’ tie, gray striped trousers perfectly creased, (Henry had never owned a frock coat) ushered him half-way down the long aisle to a seat in Mrs Ellen F. Wilson’s pew. He felt eyes on him as he walked, imagined whispers, and set his face doggedly against them all. He had set out in a sort of fervor; but now the thing was harder to do than he had imagined. The people looked cold and hostile. It was to be a long fight. He might never win. The more successful he might come to be, the more some of them would hate him and fight him down… It was queer, Herb de Casselles ushering him.

The organist slid on to his seat, up in the organ loft behind the pulpit; spread out his music and turned up the corners; pulled and pushed on stops and couplers; glanced up into his narrow mirror; adjusted his tie; fussed again with the stops; began to play.

Henry sat up stiffly, even boldly, and looked about. Across the church, in a pew near the front, sat the Watts: the Senator, on the aisle, looking curiously insignificant with his meek, red face and his little, slightly askew chin beard; Madame Watt sitting wide and high over him, like a stout hawk, chin up, nose down, beady eyes fixed firmly on the pulpit; Cicely Hamlin almost fragile beside her, eyes downcast – or was she looking at the hymns?

When Cicely was talking, with her nervous eagerness, her quick smile, her almost Frenchy gestures, she seemed gay. When in repose, as now, her delicate sensitiveness, her slightly sad expression, were evident, even to Henry.

Made him feel in the closing scene of The Prisoner of Zenda, where he was bidding the Princess who could never be his a last farewell; the mere sight of her thrilled him with a deep romantic sorrow.

Through the prayers, the announcements, the choir numbers and collection, his sacrificial mood grew more and more intense. It was something of a question whether he could hide his emotion before all these hostile people. The long fight ahead to rebuild his name in the village loomed larger and larger, began to take on an aspect that was almost terrifying. For the first time to-day he felt weakness but she made him feel something as Sothem had made in his heart. He sat very quiet, hands clenched on his knees, and unconsciously thrust out his chin a little.

When the doxology was sung and his head was bowed for the benediction, he had to struggle with a mad impulse to rush out, run down the aisle while people were picking up their hats and things. The thing to do, of course, was to take his time, be natural, move out with the rest. This he did, blazing with self-consciousness, his chin forward.

It was difficult. Several persons – older persons, who had known his mother – stopped him and congratulated him on the brilliant work he was doing. This in the midst of the unuttered hostility that seemed like hundreds of little barbed darts penetrating his skin from every side. He could only blush and mumble. Elderly, innocent Mrs Bedford of Filbert Avenue actually introduced him to her nieces from Boston as a young man of whom all Sunbury was proud. He had to blush and mumble here for a long time, while the line of people crowded decorously past.

At last he got to the door. Stiffly raising his hat as one or two groups of young people recognised him, he moved out to the sidewalk. There he raised his eyes. They met, for a fleeting instant, but squarely, over Herb de Casselles’ shoulder, the dark eyes of Cicely Hamlin.

She was sitting on the little forward seat in the black-and-plum Victoria. Madame Watt was settling herself in the back seat. The Senator was stepping in. The plum-coloured footman stood stiffly by. The plum-coloured driver sat stiffly on the box.

Herb de Casselles turned, with a wry smile.

Henry raised his hat, bit his lip, hesitated, hurried on.

Then he heard her voice.

‘Oh, Mr Calverly!’

He had to turn back. He knew he was fiery red. He knew, too, that in this state of tortured bewilderment he couldn’t trust his tongue for a moment.

Cicely leaned out, with outstretched hand.

He had to take it. The thrill the momentary touch of it gave, him but added a wrench to the torture. Then the Senator’s hand had to be taken; finally Madame’s.

His pulse was racing; pounding at his temples. What did all this mean!

Cicely, her own colour up a little, speaking quickly, her face lighting up, her hands moving, cried: —

‘Oh, Mr Calverly! We heard this morning that the Gleaner has failed and that Mr Boice has it and we aren’t to see your stories any more.’

‘No,’ said Henry, a faint touch of assurance appearing in his heart, mind, voice, ‘that isn’t so. Mr Boice hasn’t got it. We’ve got it – Humphrey Weaver and I.’

‘You mean you have purchased it?’ This from the Senator.

‘Yay-ah, We bought it yesterday.’

‘No!’ cried Cicely. ‘Really?’

‘Yay-ah. We bought it.’

‘Then,’ commented the Senator, ‘you must permit me indeed to congratulate you. It is unusual to find business acumen and enterprise combined with such a literary talent as yours.’

This was pleasing, if stilted. It was beginning to be possible for Henry to smile.

Then Cicely clinched matters.

‘You promised to come and read me the others, Mr Calverly. Oh, but you did! You must come. Really! Let me see – I know I shall be at home to-morrow evening.’

Then, for a moment, Cicely seemed to falter. She turned questioningly to her aunt.

Madame Watt certainly knew the situation. She had heard Henry discussed in relation to the Mamie Wilcox incident. She knew how high feeling was running in the village. Just what her motives were, I cannot say. Perhaps it was her tendency to make her own decisions and if possible to make different decisions from those of the folk about her. The instinct to stand out aggressively in all matters was strong within her. And she liked Henry. The flare of extreme individuality in him probably reached her and touched a curiously different strain of extreme individuality within herself. She hated sheep. Henry was not a sheep.

As for Cicely’s part of it, I know she had been thrilled when Henry read her the first ten stories. She had read more than the Sunbury girls; and she saw more in his oddities than they were capable of seeing. To fail in any degree to conform to the prevailing customs and thought was to be ridiculous in Sunbury. But she had no more forgotten the jeers that had followed Henry from this very carriage as he chased his hat down Simpson Street the preceding day than had Henry himself. Nor had she forgotten that Herbert de Casselles had been one of that unkind group. And as she certainly knew what she was about, despite her impulsiveness, I prefer to think that her action was deliberately kind and deliberately brave.

‘Come to dinner,’ said Madame Watt shortly but with a sort of rough cordiality. ‘Seven o’clock. To-morrow evening. Informal dress. All right, Watson.’

Cicely settled back, her eyes bright; but gave Henry only the same suddenly impersonal little nod of good-bye that she gave Herbert de Casselles.

The footman leaped to the box. The remarkable carriage rolled luxuriously away on its rubber tyres.

Henry turned, grinning in foolish happiness, on the young man in the frock coat who had not been asked to dinner.

‘Walking up toward Simpson, Herb?’ he asked.

‘Me – why – no, I’m going this way.’ And Herb pointed hurriedly southward.

‘Well – so long!’ said Henry, and headed northward.

The warm sunlight filtered down through the dense foliage. Birds twittered up there. The church procession moving slowly along was brightly dressed; pleasant to see. Henry, head up, light of foot, smiling easily when this or that person, after a moment’s hesitation, bowed to him, listened to the birds, expanded his chest in answer to the mellowing sunshine, and gave way, with a fresh little thrill, to the thought: —

‘I must buy a frock coat for to-morrow night.’

VIII – THIS BUD OF LOVE

1

It was mid-August and twenty minutes to eight in the evening. The double rows of maples threw spreading shadows over the pavement, sidewalk and lawns of Hazel Avenue. From dim houses, set far back amid trees and shrubs, giving a homy village quality to the darkness, came through screened doors and curtained ‘bay’ windows the yellow glow of oil lamps and the whiter shine of electric lights. Here and there a porch light softly illuminated a group of young people; their chatter and laughter, with perhaps a snatch of song, floating pleasantly out on the soft evening air. Around on a side street, sounding faintly, a youthful banjoist with soft fingers and inadequate technique was struggling with The March Past.

Moving in a curious, rather jerky manner along the street, now walking swiftly, nervously, now hesitating, even stopping, in some shadowy spot, came a youth of twenty (going on twenty-one). He wore – though all these details were hardly distinguishable even in the patches of light at the street corners, where arc lamps sputtered whitely – neatly pressed white trousers, a ‘sack’ coat of blue serge, a five-dollar straw hat, silk socks of a pattern and a silken ‘four-in-hand’ tie. He carried a cane of thin bamboo that he whipped and flicked at the grass and rattled lightly along the occasional picket fence except when he was fussing at the light growth on his upper lip. Under his left arm was a square package that any girl of Sunbury would have recognised instantly, even in the shadows, as a two-pound box of Devoe’s chocolates.

If you had chanced to be a resident of Sunbury at this period you would have known that the youth was Henry Calverly, 3rd. Though you might have had no means of knowing that he was about to ‘call’ on Cicely Hamlin. Or, except perhaps from his somewhat spasmodic locomotion, that he was in a state of considerable nervous excitement.

Not that Henry hadn’t called on many girls in his day. He had. But he had called only once before on Cicely (the other time had been that invitation to dinner for which her aunt was really responsible) and had then, in a burning glow of temperament, read her his stories!

How he had read! And read! And read! Until midnight and after. She had been enthusiastic, too.

But he wasn’t in a glow now. Certain small incidents had lately brought him to the belief that Cicely Hamlin lacked the pairing-off instinct so common among the young of Sunbury. She had been extra nice to him; true. But the fact stood that she was not ‘going with’ him. Not in the Sunbury sense of the phrase. A baffling, disturbing aura of impersonally pleasant feeling held him at a distance.

So he was just a young fellow setting forth, with chocolates, to call on a girl. A girl who could be extra nice to you and then go out of her way to maintain pleasant acquaintance with the others, your rivals, your enemies. Almost as if she felt she had been a little too nice and wished to strike a balance; at least he had thought of that. A girl who had been reared strangely in foreign convents; who didn’t know The Spanish Cavalier or Seeing Nellie Home or Solomon Levi, yet did know, strangely, that the principal theme in Dvorak’s extremely new ‘New World’ symphony was derived from Swing Low, Sweet Chariot (which illuminating fact had stirred Henry to buy, regardless, the complete piano score of that symphony and struggle to pick out the themes on Humphrey’s piano at the rooms). A girl who had never seen De Wolf Hopper in Wang, or the Bostonians in Robin Hood, or Sothem in The Prisoner of Zenda, or Maude Adams or Ethel Barrymore or anything. A girl who had none of the direct, free and easy ways of the village young; you couldn’t have started a rough-house with her – mussed her hair, or galloped her in the two-step. A girl who wasn’t stuck up, or anything like that, who seemed actually shy at times, yet subtly repressed you, made you wish you could talk like the fellow’s that had gone to Harvard.

In view of these rather remarkable facts I think it really was a tribute to Cicely Hamlin that the many discussions of her as a conspicuous addition to the youngest set had boiled down to the single descriptive adjective, ‘tactful.’ Though the characterisation seems not altogether happy; for the word, to me, connotes something of conscious skill and management – as my Crabb put it: ‘TACTFUL. See Diplomatic’ – and Cicely was not, certainly not in those days, a manager.

Henry, muttered softly, as he walked.

‘I’ll hand it to her when she comes in.

‘No, she’ll shake hands and it might get in the way.

‘Put it on the table – that’s the thing! – on a corner where she’ll see it.

‘Then some time when we can’t think of anything to talk about, I’ll say – “Thought you might like a few chocolates.” Sorta offhand. Prevent there being a lull in the conversation.

‘Better begin calling her Cicely.’

‘Why not? Shucks! Can’t go on with “You” and “Say!” Why can’t I just do it naturally? The way Herb would, or Elbow, or those fellows.

‘“How’d’ you do, Cicely! Come on, let’s take a walk.”

‘No. “Good-evening, Cicely. I thought maybe you’d like to take a walk. There’s a moonrise over the lake about half-past eight.” That’s better.

‘Wonder if Herb’ll be there. He’d hardly think to come so early, though. Be all right if I can get her away from the house by eight.’

He paused, held up his watch to the light from the corner, then rushed on.

‘Maybe she’d ask me to sit him out, anyway.’

But his lips clamped shut on this. It was just the sort of thing Cicely wouldn’t do. He knew it.

‘What if she won’t go out!’

This sudden thought brought bitterness. A snicker had run its course about town – in his eager self-absorption he had wholly forgotten – when Alfred Knight, confident in an engagement to call, had hired a horse and buggy at McAllister’s. The matter of an evening drive a deux had been referred to Cicely’s aunt. As a result the horse had stood hitched outside more than two hours only to be driven back to the livery, stable by the gloomy Al.

‘Shucks, though! Al’s a fish! Don’t blame her!’

He walked stiffly in among the trees and shrubs of the old Dexter Smith place and mounted the rather imposing front steps.

That purchase of the Dexter Smith place was typical of Madame Watt at the time. She was riding high. She had money. Two acres of lawn, fine old trees, a great square house of Milwaukee brick, high spacious rooms with elaborately moulded plaster ceilings and a built-on conservatory and a barn that you could keep half a dozen carriages in! It was one of only four or five houses in Sunbury that the Voice and the Gleaner rejoiced to call ‘mansions.’ And it was the only one that could have been bought. The William B. Snows, like the Jenkinses and the de Casselles (I don’t know if it has been explained before that the accepted local pronunciation was Dekasells,) lived in theirs. And even after the elder Dexter Smith died Mrs Smith would hardly have sold the place if the children hadn’t nagged her into it. Young Dex wanted to go to New York. And at that it was understood that Madame Watt paid two prices.