these were the first great days of the bloomer girl. She was legion. Sometimes her bloomers were bloomers, sometimes they were knickerbockers, sometimes little more than the tights of the racing breed. She was dusty, sweaty, loud. She was never the sort of girl you knew; but always appeared from the swarming, dingy back districts of the city. Sometimes she rode a single wheel, sometimes tandem with some male of the humpbacked breed and of the heavily muscled legs and the grotesquely curved handle bars. The bloomer girl was looked at askance by the well-bred folk of the shaded suburbs. Ministers thumped pulpits and harangued half-empty pews regarding this final moral, racial disaster while she rode dustily by the very doors.
Henry, as he pedalled the long machine through back streets to the rendezvous, was glad that the twilight was falling fast. In his breast pocket were copy paper and pencils, in an outer pocket his little olive-green book. His white trousers were caught about the ankles with steel dips.
Mamie kept him waiting. He hid both himself and the wheel in the shadows of the tall lilac bushes in the little village park.
She came at length, said ‘Hello!’ and with a little deft unhooking, coolly stepped out of her skirt, rolled up that garment, thrust it under a bush, and stood before him in the sort of wheeling costume rarely seen in Sunbury save on Saturdays and Sundays when the Chicago crowds were pouring through.
Henry stood motionless, silent, in the dusk.
‘Well,’ said she, smartly, ‘are we riding?’
Without a word he wheeled out the bicycle and they rolled away.
She was very close, there before him. She bent over the handle bars like an old-timer, and pedalled with something more than the abandon of a boy. It was going to be hard to talk to her… If he could only blot this day out of his life. ‘She started it,’ he thought fiercely, staring out ahead over her rhythmically moving shoulder. ‘I never asked her to come in!’
‘I didn’t know you rode a wheel,’ said he, after a time, dismally.
‘I ride Sundays with the boys from Pennyweather Point. But you needn’t tell that at home.’
‘I’m not telling anything at home,’ muttered Henry. Then she flung back at him the one word.
‘Surprised?’
‘Well – why, sorta.’
‘You thought I was satisfied to do the room work and wash dishes, I suppose!’
‘I don’t know as I thought anything.’
‘What’s the matter, anyway? Scared at my bloomers?’
‘That’s what you call’em, is it?’
‘I must say you’re grand company.’
He made no reply.
They pedalled past the university buildings, the athletic field, the lighthouse, up a grade between groves of oak, out along the brink of a clay bluff overlooking the steely dark lake – horizonless, still, a light or two twinkling far out.
‘Shall we go to Hoffman’s?’ she asked.
‘I don’t care where we go,’ said he.
6
The Weekly Voice of Sunbury was put to press every Friday evening, was printed during that night, and appeared in the first mail on Saturday mornings.
Friday, therefore, was the one distractingly busy day for Humphrey Weaver. And it was natural enough that he should snatch at Henry’s pencilled report of the musicale at Mrs Henderson’s with the briefest word of greeting, and give his whole mind, blue copy-editing pencil posed in air, to reading it. But he did note that the boy looked rather haggard, as if he hadn’t slept much. He heard his mumbled remark that he had been over at the public library, writing the thing; and perhaps wondered mildly and momentarily why the boy should be writing at the library and not at home, and why he should speak of the fact at all. And now and again during the day he was aware of Henry, pale, dog-eyed, inclined to hang about as if confidences were trembling on his tongue. And he was carrying a little olive-green book around; drew it from his pocket every now and then and read or turned the pages with an ostentatious air of concentration, as if he wanted to be noticed. Humphrey decided to ask him what the trouble was; later, when the paper was put away. When he might have spoken, old man Boice was there, at his desk. And Humphrey never got out to meals on Fridays. Henry got all his work in on time: the ‘Real Estate Notes’ for the week and the last items for ‘Along Simpson Street.’
The report of the musicale would have brought a smile or two on another day. There was nearly a column of it. Henry had apparently been deeply moved by the singing of Anne Mayer Stelton. He dwelt on the ‘velvet suavity’ of her legato passages, her firmness of attack and the ‘delicate lace work of her colourature.’ ‘Mme. Stelton’s art,’ he wrote, ‘has deepened and broadened appreciably since she last appeared in Sunbury. Always gifted with a splendid singing organ, always charming in personality and profoundly rhythmically musical in temperament, she now has added a superstructure of technical authority, which gives to each passage, whether bravura or pianissimo, a quality and distinction seldom heard in this country. Miss Corinne Doag also added immeasurably to the pleasure of the select audience by singing a group of songs. Miss Corinne Doag has a contralto voice of fine verve and timbre. She is a guest of Mrs Henderson, who herself accompanied delightfully. Among those present were: – ’
Henry’s writing always startled you a little. Words fairly flowed through his pencil, long words, striking words. He had the word sense; this when writing. In speech he remained just about where he had been all through his teens, loose of diction, slurring and eliding and using slang as did most of the Middle-Westerners among whom he had always lived, and, like them, swallowing his tongue down his throat.
Humphrey initialed the copy, tossed it into the devil’s basket, turned to a pile of proofs, paused as if recollecting something, picked up the copy again, glanced rapidly through it, and turned on his assistant.
‘Look here, Hen,’ he remarked, ‘you don’t tell what they sang, either of ‘em. Or who were among those present.’
Henry was reading his little book at the moment, and fumbling at his moustache. A mournful object.
He turned now, with a start, and stared, wide-eyed, at Humphrey. His lips parted, but he didn’t speak. A touch of colour appeared in his cheeks.
Then, as abruptly, he went limp in his chair.
‘I thought she left a list here and a programme,’ he said, eyes now on the floor.
Humphrey’s practised eye ran swiftly over the double row of pigeonholes before him. ‘Right you are!’ he exclaimed.
It was a quarter past eleven that night when Humphrey scrawled his last ‘O.K.’; stretched out his long form in his swivel chair; yawned; said, ‘Well, that’s done, thank God!’; and hummed and tapped out on his bare desk the refrain of a current song: —
‘But you’d look sweet
On the seat
Of a bicycle built for two.’
He turned on Henry with a wrinkly, comfortable grin.
‘Well, my boy, it’s too late for Stanley’s but what do you say to a bite at Ericson’s, over by the tracks?’
Then
