Henry Is Twenty: A Further Episodic History of Henry Calverly, 3rd — John Shaqi
Henry Is Twenty: A Further Episodic History of Henry Calverly, 3rdMerwin, Samuel
General
Henry Is Twenty: A Further Episodic History of Henry Calverly, 3rd
Merwin, Samuel
Young men -- Fiction
The rest of him indicated a taste that was hardly bent on the
inexpensive as such. His duck trousers (this was the middle nineties)
were smartly creased and rustled with starch. His white canvas shoes
were not 'sneakers' but had heavy soles and half-heels of red rubber.
His coat, lying now across the iron tube that marked the foot of the
bed, was a double-breasted blue serge, unlined, well-tailored. The hat,
hung on a mirror post above the 'golden oak' bureau, was of creamy white
felt. He had given up spectacles for nose glasses with a black silk
cord.
Nearly two years earlier his mother had died. He had lived on, caught in
a drift of time and circumstance, keeping, without any particular plan,
this little room with its sloping ceiling. The price was an item, of
course--six dollars a week for room and board. You couldn't do better
in Sunbury, even then. Memories haunted the place, naturally enough.
Loneliness had dwelt close with him.
His mother's picture, in a silver frame, stood at the right of the
pincushion; at the left, in hammered brass ['repoussé work') was a
'cabinet size' photograph of Martha Caldwell. A woven-wire rack on the
wall held half a hundred snapshots of girls, boys, and groups, in about
a third of which figured Martha's smiling, sensible, pleasantly freckled
face. A guitar in an old green bag leaned against the wall behind his
mother's old trunk; it had not been out of the bag in more than a year.
An assortment of neck-ties hung over the gas-jet by the bureau. Tacked
about on the wall were six or eight copies of Gibson girls; rather good
copies, barringva certain stiffness of line. On the seat in the one
dormer window reposed two cushions, one covered with college pennants,
the other with cigar bands laboriously cross-stitched together; both
from, the hands of Martha.
Henry's little bookcase was not uninteresting. It contained the
following books: Daily Strength for Daily Needs, Browning, Trollope,
and Hawthorne in sets, Sonnets, from the Portuguese, Words often
Mispronounced, Longfellow, complete in one fat volume. Red Line Edition,
and Six Thousand Puzzles, all of which had been his mother's; Green's
History of the English People, Boswell's Johnson, both largely uncut,
and the Discourses of Epictetus, which three had come as Christmas or
birthday gifts; and exactly one volume, a work by an obscure author
(who was pictured in the frontispiece with a bristling moustache and
intensely knit brows) entitled Will Power and Self Mastery, which
offered the only clue as to Henry's own taste in book buying.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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