He was now a pudgy boy who had just begun to wear spectacles. Long ago he had given up rebelling against Clem.
Clem looked at his big dollar watch. “You can stay out till eleven o’clock but you can’t play pool.”
“I was goin’ to the nickelodeon.”
“All right.”
Thus Clem had had the room alone that Monday night while he wrote to Henrietta. It might have been the solitude that moved him to ask her now to marry him. It might have been his constant wish to comfort her loneliness. It was certainly his unchanging feeling of union with her, though he had never seen her face. She was the only person in the world who could understand when he spoke about his childhood, that other world where all his roots were planted so deeply that there could be no uprooting.
“You and I have not met,” he now wrote. “It may seem—” he paused here to look up the word in his dictionary—“presumptuous for me to have the idea. But I have it and I might as well tell you. It seems to me that you and I are meant to get married. I have not seen you nor you me, but I take it we don’t care first for looks. There is something else we have together. We understand things, or so I feel. I hope you do, too.”
He paused here a long time. When he went on he wrote, “I do not like this idea of proposing to you by letter. If you are willing I will come to see you. Mr. Janison owes me some time and I have saved money. Bump can help in the store after school. I could get away a couple of days and have a whole afternoon with you.”
When he had written these words he then went on to tell her the usual news of his life. Bump had got to like school at last and was even talking of college. He’d have to work his way. He himself had given up hope of a real education but he read a lot, Miss Bean telling him what books. He had just finished The Wealth of Nations. It was hard going but full of sense. Then he told his big news. Mr. Janison, not having any children, had asked if he didn’t want to consider taking over the store some day.
Clem chewed his pen a while when he had written this. Then he went on to tell Henrietta again what he felt and what he had never told anybody except her. “If I do take this store I won’t be content just to handle the one outfit. I will likely start up my cheap food stores in other places. I haven’t got it all worked out but I believe it can be done like I have told you. Farmers can sell cheap if they can sell direct. Plenty of people need to eat more and better food. I could maybe think out some way even to ship food across to the people in China, or maybe just help them over there, once I learned how here, to get their own food around. It’s really a world proposition, as I see it.”
He paused again, frowned and sighed. “Henrietta, I hope you will understand that I am not just interested in material things. But I feel that if everybody had enough food so they did not need to worry about where their next meal was coming from, then they could think about better things. I have not the education for teaching people but I could feed them. Anyway, to my thinking, food is something people ought to have the way they have water and air. They ought not to have to ask for it or even work for it, for all have the right to live.”
He paused again and closed his letter with these words. “I hope you will forget your brother William’s attitude toward you as you feel it is, and remember that I care enough to make up for it to you, if you will let me.”
Such a letter deserved many readings before it was committed to certainty, and he read it again and again. There was nothing in it to change, he decided finally, although he would have liked to make it more polished in the writing since she was in college. This he did not know how to do and so he sealed it, addressed it, and took it to the corner postbox. There he noticed by the town clock that it was a quarter past eleven. He was just beginning to allow himself to feel severe about Bump when he saw the light come on in the room above the store. The boy was home, then. Everything was all right. He walked down the street toward the store whistling slightly off key a tune whose name he did not know.
This was the letter Henrietta received on Thursday. She kept it with her all night, waking twice to read it over again by the thin light of a candle shaded against her sleeping roommate. Of course she wanted to marry Clem. No man had ever asked her to marry him, no boy had ever asked her to a dance. Yet she wanted to go slowly about loving Clem and marrying him because it was her whole romance and there would be no other. It was wonderful to feel his letter in her bosom, a warm and living promise of love. She could trust his love as she had not trusted even the love of her parents or Ruth’s demanding affection. Tomorrow, in the library where it was quiet, up in the stacks where she had a cubbyhole because she was doing a piece of original research in her chemistry, she would write to Clem and tell him that if when they met, they both felt the same way …
The next day in the cubbyhole, writing these very words, she was interrupted by her giggling roommate.
“Henrietta, there’s a man wants to see you!”
“A man?” She was incredulous, too.
“A young man, terribly skinny, covered with dust!”
She knew instantly that it was Clem. Without a word more she ran down the narrow iron steps and across the hall, across a stretch of lawn to the dormitory sitting room. It was early afternoon and no one else was there except Clem. He stood in the middle of the floor waiting for her.
“I had to come,” he said abruptly and shook her hand with a wrenching grip. “I oughtn’t to have put it in a letter. If a fellow wants to marry a girl he ought to come and say so.”
“Oh,” she gasped, “that’s all right. I didn’t mind.”
They stood looking at each other, drinking in the detail of the flesh. They were both plain, both honest, both lonely, and one face looking at the other saw there its own reflection.
“Henrietta, do you feel the way I do?” Clem asked. His voice trembled.
Henrietta flushed. Then he did not mind the way she looked, her straight dark hair, her ugly nose and small gray eyes, her wide mouth.
“You might not like me — after you got to know me.” Her voice was trembling too.
“Everything you are shines right out of you,” he said. “You’re the kind I need — somebody to put my faith in. Oh, I need faith!”
She gave a great sigh that ended in a choking gasp. “Nobody has ever really needed me, I guess. Oh, Clem—”
They put their arms around each other awkwardly and their lips met in the passionless kiss of inexperienced love.
He stayed the rest of the day and she forgot her work. They wandered together over the campus and she told him about the buildings and pointed out her window. She took him into the chemistry laboratory, empty by the end of the day, and explained to him what she was trying to do, and he listened, straining to understand the union of the elements.
“I sure do wish I had education,” he said with such longing that she could not bear his deprivation.
“Clem, why can’t you give up the store and go to college? Lots of fellows work their way through, or very nearly.”
He shook his head. “I can’t afford to do it. I’m too far on my way. Besides, I haven’t time for all of it. I just want to learn what I need — this chemistry stuff, for instance, I have an idea I could discover a whole lot of new foods. Has anybody gone at it that way?”
“Not that I know of,” she said.
They took the eight o’clock train to town and had a sandwich together at a cheap restaurant. The night was warm and the darkness was not deep when they were finished. They walked up and down the platform together, hand in hand, dreading to part, now that they had met.
“When shall we meet again?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I ought to ask your father, I guess. Isn’t that the right thing?”