‘Say, Hump, you don’t mean to say you really read all those!’
‘You walked home with them. Go on.’
‘Oh, well, they asked me to stay to supper, and I did, and some folks came in, and we sang and things, and then we – oh, yes, how much was the cheese?’
‘How in thunder do I know?’
‘Well – there was a pound of it – Mrs Henderson made a rabbit.
The none too subtle chill in the atmosphere about Humphrey seemed at last to be meeting and somewhat subduing the exuberant good cheer that radiated from Henry. He fell to fingering his moustache, and studying the bed-posts. Once or twice, he looked up, hesitated on the brink of speech, only to lower his eyes again.
Then, unexpectedly, he chuckled aloud, and said, ‘She’s a wonderful girl. At first she seems quiet, but when you get to know her… going to take a walk with me to-morrow morning. She was going to church with Mrs H., but I told her we’d worship in God’s great outdoor temple.’
He yawned now. And stretched, deliberately, luxuriously like a healthy animal, his arms above his head.
‘Well,’ said he, ‘it’s late as all get out. I suppose you want to go to sleep.’ He got as far as the door, then leaned confidingly against the wall. ‘Look here, Hump, I don’t want you to think I don’t appreciate your taking me in like this. It’s dam nice of you. Don’t know what I’d have done if it wasn’t for you. Well, good-night.’
He got part way out the door this time; then, brushed by a wave of his earlier moody self-consciousness, turned back. He even came in and leaned over the foot of the bed, and flushed a little. It occurred to Humphrey that the boy appeared to be momentarily ashamed of his present happiness.
‘Do you know what was the matter with me?’ he broke out. ‘It was just what you said. I was taking things too hard. The great thing is to be rational, normal. Thing with me was I used to go to one extreme and now these last two years I’ve been going with all my might to the other. Of course it wouldn’t work… Do you know who’s helped me a whole lot? You’d never guess.’ Rather shamefaced, he drew from his pocket a little book bound in olive-green ‘ooze’ leather. ‘It’s this old fellow. Epictetus. Listen to what he says – “To the rational animal only is the irrational intolerable.” That was the trouble with me. I just wasn’t a rational animal. I wasn’t… Well, I’ve got to say good-night.’
This time he went.
Humphrey heard him getting out of his clothes and into the bed that Humphrey himself had made up on the box couch. It seemed only a moment later that he was snoring – softly, slowly, comfortably, like a rational animal.
The minute hand of the alarm clock on Humphrey’s bureau crept up to twelve, the hour hand to one. Then came a single resonant, reverberating boom from the big clock up at the university.
Slowly, lips compressed, Humphrey got up, and in his pyjamas and slippers went downstairs and switched off the door light he found burning there. The stair light could be turned off upstairs.
Then, instead of going up, he opened the door and stood looking out on the calm village night.
‘Of all the – ’ he muttered inconclusively. ‘Why it’s – he’s a – Good God! It’s the limit! It’s – it’s intolerable.’
The word, floating from his own lips, caught his ear. His frown began, very slowly, to relax. A dry, grudging smile wrinkled its way across his mobile face. And he nodded, deliberately. ‘Epictetus,’ he remarked, ‘was right.’
II – IN SAND-FLY TIME
1
It was half-past nine of a Sabbath morning at the beginning of June. The beneficent sunshine streamed down on the dark-like streets, on the shingled roofs of the many decorous but comfortable homes, on the wide lawns, on the hundreds of washed and brushed little boys and starched little girls that were marching meekly to the various Sunday schools, Presbyterian, Methodist, Episcopal, Congregational, Baptist. Above the new cement sidewalk on Simpson Street – where all the stores were closed except two drug stores and Swanson’s flower shop – the sunshine quivered and wavered, bringing oppressive promise of the first really warm day of the young summer. Slow-swinging church bells sent out widening, reverberating circles of mellow tone through the still air.
The sun shone too on the old barn back of the Parmenter place.
The barn presented an odd appearance; the red paint of an earlier decade in the nineteenth century here faded to brown, there flaked off altogether, but the upstairs part, once the haymow, embellished with neat double windows. Below, giving on the alley, was a white-painted door with a single step and an ornamental boot scraper.
Within, in Humphrey’s room, the bed was neatly made, clothes hung in a corner, shoes and slippers stood in a row.
In Henry’s room the couch bed was a rumpled heap, a suit-case lay on the floor half-unpacked, a trunk was in the same condition, clothes, shoes, neckties, photographs were scattered about on table, chairs and floor, a box of books by the bed, the guitar in its old green woollen bag leaning against the door.
In a corner of the living-room the doors of an ingeniously contrived cupboard stood open, disclosing a sink, shelves of dishes, and a small ice-box.
Humphrey, in shirt, trousers and slippers, stood washing the breakfast things. He was smoking his cob pipe. His long, wrinkly, usually quizzical face, could Henry have seen it, was deathly sober.
Henry, however, could see only the lean back. And he looked at that only momentarily. He was busy smoothing the fringe along his upper lip and twisting it up at the ends. Too, he leaned slightly on his bamboo walking stick, staring down at it, watching it bend. Despite his white ducks and shoes, serge coat, creamy white felt hat on the back of his shapely head, despite the rather noticeable nose glasses with the black silk cord hanging from them to his lapel, he presented a forlorn picture. He wished Humphrey would say something. That long back was hostile. Henry was helpless before hostility, as before logic. Already they weren’t getting on. Little things like washing dishes and making beds and – dusting! Humphrey was proving an old fuss-budget. And Henry couldn’t think what to do about it. He could never: – never in the world – do those fussy things, use his hands. He couldn’t even flounder through the little mental processes that lead up to doing things with your hands. He wasn’t that sort of person. Humphrey was.
‘Oh, thunder – Hump!’ Thus Henry, weakly. ‘Let the old dishes slide a little while. I’ll be back. It ain’t my fault that I’ve got a date now.’
Humphrey set down a cup rather hard, rolled the dish-towel into a ball and threw it, with heat, after the cup, then strode to the window, nursing his pipe and staring out at the gooseberry and currant bushes in the back yard of the First Presbyterian parsonage across the alley.
Humphrey liked order. It was the breath of his life. Combined with solitude it spelled peace to his bachelor soul. But here it was only the second day and the place was a pigsty. What would it be in a week!
He was aware that Henry moved over, all hesitation, and with words, to shut the door of that hopelessly littered bedroom. The boy appeared to have no intention of picking up his things; he wasn’t even unpacking! Leaving his clothes that way 1… The words he was so confusedly uttering were the absurdest excuses: ‘Just shut the door – fix it all up when I get back – an hour or so…
It was in a wave of unaccustomed sentimentalism that Humphrey had gathered him in. Humphrey had few visitors. You couldn’t work with aimless youths hanging around. He knew all about that. Humphrey’s evenings were precious. His time was figured out, Monday morning to Saturday night, to the minute. And the Sundays were always an orgy of work. But this youth, to whom he had opened his quarters and his slightly acid heart, was the most aimless being he had ever known. An utter surprise; a shock. Yet here he was, all over the place.
Humphrey was trying, by a mighty effort of will, to get himself back into that maudlin state of pity