THE TURMOIL
A NOVEL
By Booth Tarkington
1915.
To Laurel.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
There is a midland city in the heart of fair, open country, a dirty and wonderful city nesting dingily in the fog of its own smoke. The stranger must feel the dirt before he feels the wonder, for the dirt will be upon him instantly. It will be upon him and within him, since he must breathe it, and he may care for no further proof that wealth is here better loved than cleanliness; but whether he cares or not, the negligently tended streets incessantly press home the point, and so do the flecked and grimy citizens. At a breeze he must smother in the whirlpools of dust, and if he should decline at any time to inhale the smoke he has the meager alternative of suicide.
The smoke is like the bad breath of a giant panting for more and more riches. He gets them and pants the fiercer, smelling and swelling prodigiously. He has a voice, a hoarse voice, hot and rapacious trained to one tune: “Wealth! I will get Wealth! I will make Wealth! I will sell Wealth for more Wealth! My house shall be dirty, my garment shall be dirty, and I will foul my neighbor so that he cannot be clean—but I will get Wealth! There shall be no clean thing about me: my wife shall be dirty and my child shall be dirty, but I will get Wealth!” And yet it is not wealth that he is so greedy for: what the giant really wants is hasty riches. To get these he squanders wealth upon the four winds, for wealth is in the smoke.
Not so long ago as a generation, there was no panting giant here, no heaving, grimy city; there was but a pleasant big town of neighborly people who had understanding of one another, being, on the whole, much of the same type. It was a leisurely and kindly place—“homelike,” it was called—and when the visitor had been taken through the State Asylum for the Insane and made to appreciate the view of the cemetery from a little hill, his host's duty as Baedeker was done. The good burghers were given to jogging comfortably about in phaetons or in surreys for a family drive on Sunday. No one was very rich; few were very poor; the air was clean, and there was time to live.
But there was a spirit abroad in the land, and it was strong here as elsewhere—a spirit that had moved in the depths of the American soil and labored there, sweating, till it stirred the surface, rove the mountains, and emerged, tangible and monstrous, the god of all good American hearts—Bigness. And that god wrought the panting giant.
In the souls of the burghers there had always been the profound longing for size. Year by year the longing increased until it became an accumulated force: We must Grow! We must be Big! We must be Bigger! Bigness means Money! And the thing began to happen; their longing became a mighty Will. We must be Bigger! Bigger! Bigger! Get people here! Coax them here! Bribe them! Swindle them into coming, if you must, but get them! Shout them into coming! Deafen them into coming! Any kind of people; all kinds of people! We must be Bigger! Blow! Boost! Brag! Kill the fault-finder! Scream and bellow to the Most High: Bigness is patriotism and honor! Bigness is love and life and happiness! Bigness is Money! We want Bigness!
They got it. From all the states the people came; thinly at first, and slowly, but faster and faster in thicker and thicker swarms as the quick years went by. White people came, and black people and brown people and yellow people; the negroes came from the South by the thousands and thousands, multiplying by other thousands and thousands faster than they could die. From the four quarters of the earth the people came, the broken and the unbroken, the tame and the wild—Germans, Irish, Italians, Hungarians, Scotch, Welsh, English, French, Swiss, Swedes, Norwegians, Greeks, Poles, Russian Jews, Dalmatians, Armenians, Rumanians, Servians, Persians, Syrians, Japanese, Chinese, Turks, and every hybrid that these could propagate. And if there were no Eskimos nor Patagonians, what other human strain that earth might furnish failed to swim and bubble in this crucible?
With Bigness came the new machinery and the rush; the streets began to roar and rattle, the houses to tremble; the pavements were worn under the tread of hurrying multitudes. The old, leisurely, quizzical look of the faces was lost in something harder and warier; and a cockney type began to emerge discernibly—a cynical young mongrel barbaric of feature, muscular and cunning; dressed in good fabrics fashioned apparently in imitation of the sketches drawn by newspaper comedians. The female of his kind came with him—a pale girl, shoddy and a little rouged; and they communicated in a nasal argot, mainly insolences and elisions. Nay, the common speech of the people showed change: in place of the old midland vernacular, irregular but clean, and not unwholesomely drawling, a jerky dialect of coined metaphors began to be heard, held together by GUNNAS and GOTTAS and much fostered by the public journals.
The city piled itself high in the center, tower on tower for a nucleus, and spread itself out over the plain, mile after mile; and in its vitals, like benevolent bacilli contending with malevolent in the body of a man, missions and refuges offered what resistance they might to the saloons and all the hells that cities house and shelter. Temptation and ruin were ready commodities on the market for purchase by the venturesome; highwaymen walked the streets at night and sometimes killed; snatching thieves were busy everywhere in the dusk; while house-breakers were a common apprehension and frequent reality. Life itself was somewhat safer from intentional destruction than it was in medieval Rome during a faction war—though the Roman murderer was more like to pay for his deed—but death or mutilation beneath the wheels lay in ambush at every crossing.
The politicians let the people make all the laws they liked; it did not matter much, and the taxes went up, which is good for politicians. Law-making was a pastime of the people; nothing pleased them more. Singular fermentation of their humor, they even had laws forbidding dangerous speed. More marvelous still, they had a law forbidding smoke! They forbade chimneys to smoke and they forbade cigarettes to smoke. They made laws for all things and forgot them immediately; though sometimes they would remember after a while, and hurry to make new laws that the old laws should be enforced—and then forget both new and old. Wherever enforcement threatened Money or Votes—or wherever it was too much to bother—it became a joke. Influence was the law.
So the place grew. And it grew strong.
Straightway when he came, each man fell to the same worship:
Give me of thyself, O Bigness:
Power to get more power!
Riches to get more riches!
Give me of thy sweat that I may sweat more!
Give me Bigness to get more Bigness to myself,
O Bigness, for Thine is the Power and the Glory! And
there is no end but Bigness, ever and for ever!
CHAPTER II
The Sheridan Building was the biggest skyscraper; the Sheridan Trust Company was the biggest of its kind, and Sheridan himself had been the biggest builder and breaker and truster and buster under the smoke. He had come from a country cross-roads, at the beginning of the growth, and he had gone up and down in the booms and relapses of that period; but each time he went down he rebounded a little higher, until finally, after a year of overwork and anxiety—the latter not decreased by a chance, remote but possible, of recuperation from the former in the penitentiary—he found himself on top, with solid substance under his feet; and thereafter “played it safe.” But his hunger to get was unabated, for it was in the very bones of him and grew fiercer.
He was the city incarnate. He loved it, calling it God's country, as he called the smoke Prosperity, breathing the dingy cloud with relish. And when soot fell upon his cuff he chuckled; he could have kissed it. “It's good! It's good!” he said, and smacked his lips in gusto. “Good, clean soot; it's our life-blood, God bless it!” The smoke was one of his great enthusiasms; he laughed at a committee of plaintive housewives who called to beg his aid against it. “Smoke's what brings your husbands' money home on Saturday night,” he told them, jovially. “Smoke may hurt your little shrubberies in the front yard some, but it's the catarrhal climate and the adenoids that starts your chuldern coughing. Smoke makes the climate better. Smoke means good health: it makes the people wash more. They have to wash so much they wash off the microbes. You go home and ask your husbands what smoke puts in their pockets out o' the pay-roll—and you'll come around next time to get me to turn out more smoke instead o' chokin' it off!”
It was Narcissism in him to love the city so well; he saw his reflection in it; and, like it, he was grimy, big, careless, rich, strong, and unquenchably optimistic. From the deepest of his inside all the way out he believed it was the finest city in the world. “Finest” was his word. He thought of it as his city as he thought of his family as his family; and just as profoundly believed his city to be the finest city in the world, so did he believe his family to be—in spite of his son Bibbs—the finest family in the world. As a matter of fact, he knew nothing worth knowing about either.
Bibbs Sheridan was a musing sort of boy, poor in health, and considered the failure—the “odd one”—of the family. Born during that most dangerous and anxious of the early years, when the mother fretted and the father took his chance, he was an ill-nourished baby, and grew meagerly, only lengthwise, through a feeble childhood. At his christening he was committed for life to “Bibbs” mainly through lack of imagination on his mother's part, for though it was her maiden name, she had no strong affection for it; but it was “her turn” to name the baby, and, as she explained later, she “couldn't think of anything else she liked AT ALL!” She offered this explanation one day when the sickly boy was nine and after a long fit of brooding had demanded some reason for his name's being Bibbs. He requested then with unwonted vehemence to be allowed to exchange names with his older brother, Roscoe Conkling Sheridan, or with the oldest, James Sheridan, Junior, and upon being refused went down into the cellar and remained there the rest of that day. And the cook, descending toward dusk, reported that he had vanished; but a search revealed that he was in the coal-pile, completely covered and still burrowing. Removed by force and carried upstairs, he maintained a cryptic demeanor, refusing to utter a syllable of explanation, even under the lash. This obvious thing was wholly a mystery to both parents; the mother was nonplussed, failed to trace and connect; and the father regarded his son as a stubborn and mysterious fool, an impression not effaced as the years went by.
At twenty-two, Bibbs was physically no more than the outer scaffolding of a man, waiting for the building to begin inside—a long-shanked, long-faced, rickety youth, sallow and hollow and haggard, dark-haired and dark-eyed, with a peculiar expression of countenance; indeed, at first sight of Bibbs Sheridan a stranger might well be solicitous, for he seemed upon the point of tears. But to a slightly longer gaze, not grief, but mirth, was revealed as his emotion; while a more searching scrutiny was proportionately more puzzling—he seemed about to burst out crying or to burst out laughing, one or the other, inevitably, but it was impossible to decide which. And Bibbs never, on any occasion of his life, either laughed aloud or wept.
He was a “disappointment” to his father. At least that was the parent's word—a confirmed and established word after his first attempt to make a “business man” of the boy. He sent Bibbs to “begin at the bottom and learn from the ground up” in the machine-shop of the Sheridan Automatic Pump Works, and at the end of six months the family physician sent Bibbs to begin at the bottom and learn from the ground up in a sanitarium.
“You needn't worry, mamma,” Sheridan told his wife. “There's nothin' the matter with Bibbs except he hates work so much it makes him sick. I put him in the machine-shop, and I guess I know what I'm doin' about as well as the next man. Ole Doc Gurney always was one o' them nutty alarmists. Does he think I'd do anything 'd be bad for my own flesh and blood? He makes me tired!”
Anything except perfectly definite health or perfectly definite disease was incomprehensible to Sheridan. He had a genuine conviction that lack of physical persistence in any task involving money must be due to some subtle weakness of character itself, to some profound shiftlessness or slyness. He understood typhoid fever, pneumonia, and appendicitis—one had them, and either died or got over them and went back to work—but when the word “nervous” appeared in a diagnosis he became honestly suspicious: he had the feeling that there was something contemptible about it, that there was a nigger in the wood-pile somewhere.
“Look at me,” he said. “Look at what I did at his age! Why, when I was twenty years old, wasn't I up every morning at four o'clock choppin' wood—yes! and out in the dark and the snow—to build a fire in a country grocery store? And here Bibbs has to go and have a DOCTOR because he can't—Pho! it makes me tired! If he'd gone at it like a man he wouldn't be sick.”
He paced the bedroom—the usual setting for such parental discussions—in his nightgown, shaking his big, grizzled head and gesticulating to his bedded spouse. “My Lord!” he said. “If a little, teeny bit o' work like this is too much for him, why, he ain't fit for anything! It's nine-tenths imagination, and the rest of it—well, I won't say it's deliberate, but I WOULD like to know just how much of it's put on!”
“Bibbs didn't want the doctor,” said Mrs. Sheridan. “It was when he was here to dinner that night, and noticed how he couldn't eat anything. Honey, you better come to bed.”
“Eat!” he snorted. “Eat! It's work that makes men eat! And it's imagination that keeps people from eatin'. Busy men don't get time for that kind of imagination; and there's another thing you'll notice about good health, if you'll take the trouble to look around you Mrs. Sheridan: busy men haven't got time to be sick and they don't GET sick. You just think it over and you'll find that ninety-nine per cent. of the sick people you know are either women or loafers. Yes, ma'am!”
“Honey,” she said again, drowsily, “you better come to bed.”
“Look at the other boys,” her husband bade her. “Look at Jim and Roscoe. Look at how THEY work! There isn't a shiftless bone in their bodies. Work never made Jim or Roscoe sick. Jim takes half the load off my shoulders already. Right now there isn't a harder-workin', brighter business man in this city than Jim. I've pushed him, but he give me something to push AGAINST. You can't push 'nervous dyspepsia'! And look at Roscoe; just LOOK at what that boy's done for himself, and barely twenty-seven years old—married, got a fine wife, and ready to build for himself with his own money, when I put up the New House for you and Edie.”
“Papa, you'll catch cold in your bare feet,” she murmured. “You better come to bed.”
“And I'm just as proud of Edie, for a girl,” he continued, emphatically, “as I am of Jim and Roscoe for boys. She'll make some man a mighty good wife when the time comes. She's the prettiest and talentedest girl in the United States! Look at that poem she wrote when she was in school and took the prize with; it's the best poem I ever read in my life, and she'd never even tried to write one before. It's the finest thing I ever read, and R. T. Bloss said so, too; and I guess he's a good enough literary judge for me—turns out more advertisin' liter'cher than any man in the city. I tell you she's smart! Look at the way she worked me to get me to promise the New House—and I guess you had your finger in that, too, mamma! This old shack's good enough for me, but you and little Edie 'll have to have your way. I'll get behind her and push her the same as I will Jim and Roscoe. I tell you I'm mighty proud o' them three chuldern! But Bibbs—” He paused, shaking his head. “Honest, mamma, when I talk to men that got ALL their boys doin' well and worth their salt, why, I have to keep my mind on Jim and Roscoe and forget about Bibbs.”
Mrs. Sheridan tossed her head fretfully upon the pillow. “You did the best you could, papa,” she said, impatiently, “so come to bed and quit reproachin' yourself for it.”
He glared at her indignantly. “Reproachin' myself!” he snorted. “I ain't doin' anything of the kind! What in the name o' goodness would I want to reproach myself for? And it wasn't the 'best I could,' either. It was the best ANYBODY could! I was givin' him a chance to show what was in him and make a man of himself—and here he goes and gets 'nervous dyspepsia' on me!”
He went to the old-fashioned gas-fixture, turned out the light, and muttered his way morosely into bed.
“What?” said his wife, crossly, bothered by a subsequent mumbling.
“More like hook-worm, I said,” he explained, speaking louder. “I don't know what to do with him!”
CHAPTER III
Beginning at the beginning and learning from the ground up was a long course for Bibbs at the sanitarium, with milk and “zwieback” as the basis of instruction; and the months were many and tiresome before he was considered near enough graduation to go for a walk leaning on a nurse and a cane. These and subsequent months saw the planning, the building, and the completion of the New House; and it was to that abode of Bigness that Bibbs was brought when the cane, without the nurse, was found sufficient to his support.
Edith met him at the station. “Well, well, Bibbs!” she said, as he came slowly through the gates, the last of all the travelers from that train. She gave his hand a brisk little shake, averting her eyes after a quick glance at him, and turning at once toward the passage to the street. “Do you think they ought to've let you come? You certainly don't look well!”
“But I certainly do look better,” he returned, in a voice as slow as his gait; a drawl that was a necessity, for when Bibbs tried to speak quickly he stammered. “Up to about a month ago it took two people to see me. They had to get me in a line between 'em!”
Edith did not turn her eyes directly toward him again, after her first quick glance; and her expression, in spite of her, showed a faint, troubled distaste, the look of a healthy person pressed by some obligation of business to visit a “bad” ward in a hospital. She was nineteen, fair and slim, with small, unequal features, but a prettiness of color and a brilliancy of eyes that created a total impression close upon beauty. Her movements were eager and restless: there was something about her, as kind old ladies say, that was very sweet; and there was something that was hurried and breathless. This was new to Bibbs; it was a perceptible change since he had last seen her, and he bent upon her a steady, whimsical scrutiny as they stood at the curb, waiting for an automobile across the street to disengage itself from the traffic.
“That's the new car,” she said. “Everything's new. We've got four now, besides Jim's. Roscoe's got two.”
“Edith, you look—” he began, and paused.
“Oh, WE're all well,” she said, briskly; and then, as if something in his tone had caught her as significant, “Well, HOW do I look, Bibbs?”
“You look—” He paused again, taking in the full length of her—her trim brown shoes, her scant, tapering, rough skirt, and her coat of brown and green, her long green tippet and her mad little rough hat in the mad mode—all suited to the October day.
“How do I look?” she insisted.
“You look,” he answered, as his examination ended upon an incrusted watch of platinum and enamel at her wrist, “you look—expensive!” That was a substitute for what he intended to say, for her constraint and preoccupation, manifested particularly in her keeping her direct glance away from him, did not seem to grant the privilege of impulsive intimacies.
“I expect I am!” she laughed, and sidelong caught the direction of his glance. “Of course I oughtn't to wear it in the daytime—it's an evening thing, for the theater—but my day wrist-watch is out of gear. Bobby Lamhorn broke it yesterday; he's a regular rowdy sometimes. Do you want Claus to help you in?”
“Oh no,” said Bibbs. “I'm alive.” And after a fit of panting subsequent to his climbing into the car unaided, he added, “Of course, I have to TELL people!”
“We only got your telegram this morning,” she said, as they began to move rapidly through the “wholesale district” neighboring the station. “Mother said she'd hardly expected you this month.”
“They seemed to be through with me up there in the country,” he explained, gently. “At least they said they were, and they wouldn't keep me any longer, because so many really sick people wanted to get in. They told me to go home—and I didn't have any place else to go. It'll be all right, Edith; I'll sit in the woodshed until after dark every day.”
“Pshaw!” She laughed nervously. “Of course we're all of us glad to have you back.”
“Yes?” he said. “Father?”
“Of course! Didn't he write and tell you to come home?” She did not turn to him with the question. All the while she rode with her face directly forward.
“No,” he said; “father hasn't written.”
She flushed a little. “I expect I ought to've written sometime, or one of the boys—”
“Oh no; that was all right.”
“You can't think how busy we've all been this year, Bibbs. I often planned to write—and then, just as I was going to, something would turn up. And I'm sure it's been just the same way with Jim and Roscoe. Of course we knew mamma was writing often and—”
“Of course!” he said, readily. “There's a chunk of coal fallen on your glove, Edith. Better flick it off before it smears. My word! I'd almost forgotten how sooty it is here.”
“We've been having very bright weather this month—for us.” She blew the flake of soot into the air, seeming relieved.
He looked up at the dingy sky, wherein hung the disconsolate sun like a cold tin pan nailed up in a smoke-house by some lunatic, for a decoration. “Yes,” said Bibbs. “It's very gay.” A few moments later, as they passed a corner, “Aren't we going home?” he asked.
“Why, yes! Did you want to go somewhere else first?”
“No. Your new driver's taking us out of the way, isn't he?”
“No. This is right. We're going straight home.”
“But we've passed the corner. We always turned—”
“Good gracious!” she cried. “Didn't you know we'd moved? Didn't you know we were in the New House?”
“Why, no!” said Bibbs. “Are you?”
“We've been there a month! Good gracious! Didn't you know—” She broke off, flushing again, and then went on hastily: “Of course, mamma's never been so busy in her life; we ALL haven't had time to do anything but keep on the hop. Mamma couldn't even come to the station to-day. Papa's got some of his business friends and people from around the OLD-house neighborhood coming to-night for a big dinner and 'house-warming'—dreadful kind of people—but mamma's got it all on her hands. She's never sat down a MINUTE; and if she did, papa would have her up again before—”
“Of course,” said Bibbs. “Do you like the new place, Edith?”
“I don't like some of the things father WOULD have in it, but it's the finest house in town, and that ought to be good enough for me! Papa bought one thing I like—a view of the Bay of Naples in oil that's perfectly beautiful; it's the first thing you see as you come in the front hall, and it's eleven feet long. But he would have that old fruit picture we had in the Murphy Street house hung up in the new dining-room. You remember it—a table and a watermelon sliced open, and a lot of rouged-looking apples and some shiny lemons, with two dead prairie-chickens on a chair? He bought it at a furniture-store years and years ago, and he claims it's a finer picture than any they saw in the museums, that time he took mamma to Europe. But it's horribly out of date to have those things in dining-rooms, and I caught Bobby Lamhorn giggling at it; and Sibyl made fun of it, too, with Bobby, and then told papa she agreed with him about its being such a fine thing, and said he did just right to insist on having it where he wanted it. She makes me tired! Sibyl!”
Edith's first constraint with her brother, amounting almost to awkwardness, vanished with this theme, though she still kept her full gaze always to the front, even in the extreme ardor of her denunciation of her sister-in-law.
“SIBYL!” she repeated, with such heat and vigor that the name seemed to strike fire on her lips. “I'd like to know why Roscoe couldn't have married somebody from HERE that would have done us some good! He could have got in with Bobby Lamhorn years ago just as well as now, and Bobby'd have introduced him to the nicest girls in town, but instead of that he had to go and pick up this Sibyl Rink! I met some awfully nice people from her town when mamma and I were at Atlantic City, last spring, and not one had ever heard of the Rinks! Not even HEARD of 'em!”
“I thought you were great friends with Sibyl,” Bibbs said.
“Up to the time I found her out!” the sister returned, with continuing vehemence. “I've found out some things about Mrs. Roscoe Sheridan lately—”
“It's only lately?”
“Well—” Edith hesitated, her lips setting primly. “Of course, I always did see that she never cared the snap of her little finger about ROSCOE!”
“It seems,” said Bibbs, in laconic protest, “that she married him.”
The sister emitted a shrill cry, to be interpreted as contemptuous laughter, and, in her emotion, spoke too impulsively: “Why, she'd have married YOU!”
“No, no,” he said; “she couldn't be that bad!”
“I didn't mean—” she began, distressed. “I only meant—I didn't mean—”
“Never mind, Edith,” he consoled her. “You see, she couldn't have married me, because I didn't know her; and besides, if she's as mercenary as all that she'd have been too clever. The head doctor even had to lend me the money for my ticket home.”
“I didn't mean anything unpleasant about YOU,” Edith babbled. “I only meant I thought she was the kind of girl who was so simply crazy to marry somebody she'd have married anybody that asked her.”
“Yes, yes,” said Bibbs, “it's all straight.” And, perceiving that his sister's expression was that of a person whose adroitness has set matters perfectly to rights, he chuckled silently.
“Roscoe's perfectly lovely to her,” she continued, a moment later. “Too lovely! If he'd wake up a little and lay down the law, some day, like a MAN, I guess she'd respect him more and learn to behave herself!”
“'Behave'?”
“Oh, well, I mean she's so insincere,” said Edith, characteristically evasive when it came to stating the very point to which she had led, and in this not unique of her sex.
Bibbs contented himself with a non-committal gesture. “Business is crawling up the old streets,” he said, his long, tremulous hand indicating a vasty structure in course of erection. “The boarding-houses come first and then the—”
“That isn't for shops,” she informed him. “That's a new investment of papa's—the 'Sheridan Apartments.'”
“Well, well,” he murmured. “I supposed 'Sheridan' was almost well enough known here already.”
“Oh, we're well enough known ABOUT!” she said, impatiently. “I guess there isn't a man, woman, child, or nigger baby in town that doesn't know who we are. But we aren't in with the right people.”
“No!” he exclaimed. “Who's all that?”
“Who's all what?”
“The 'right people.'”
“You know what I mean: the best people, the old families—the people that have the real social position in this town and that know they've got it.”
Bibbs indulged in his silent chuckle again; he seemed greatly amused. “I thought that the people who actually had the real what-you-may-call-it didn't know it,” he said. “I've always understood that it was very unsatisfactory, because if you thought about it you didn't have it, and if you had it you didn't know it.”
“That's just bosh,” she retorted. “They know it in this town, all right! I found out a lot of things, long before we began to think of building out in this direction. The right people in this town aren't always the society-column ones, and they mix around with outsiders, and they don't all belong to any one club—they're taken in all sorts into all their clubs—but they're a clan, just the same; and they have the clan feeling and they're just as much We, Us and Company as any crowd you read about anywhere in the world. Most of 'em were here long before papa came, and the grandfathers of the girls of my age knew each other, and—”
“I see,” Bibbs interrupted, gravely. “Their ancestors fled together from many a stricken field, and Crusaders' blood flows in their veins. I always understood the first house was built by an old party of the name of Vertrees who couldn't get along with Dan'l Boone, and hurried away to these parts because Dan'l wanted him to give back a gun he'd lent him.”
Edith gave a little ejaculation of alarm. “You mustn't repeat that story, Bibbs, even if it's true. The Vertreeses are THE best family, and of course the very oldest here; they were an old family even before Mary Vertrees's great-great-grandfather came west and founded this settlement. He came from Lynn, Massachusetts, and they have relatives there YET—some of the best people in Lynn!”
“No!” exclaimed Bibbs, incredulously.
“And there are other old families like the Vertreeses,” she went on, not heeding him; “the Lamhorns and the Kittersbys and the J. Palmerston Smiths—”
“Strange names to me,” he interrupted. “Poor things! None of them have my acquaintance.”
“No, that's just it!” she cried. “And papa had never even heard the name of Vertrees! Mrs. Vertrees went with some anti-smoke committee to see him, and he told her that smoke was what made her husband bring home his wages from the pay-roll on Saturday night! HE told us about it, and I thought I just couldn't live through the night, I was so ashamed! Mr. Vertrees has always lived on his income, and papa didn't know him, of course. They're the stiffist, most elegant people in the whole town. And to crown it all, papa went and bought the next lot to the old Vertrees country mansion—it's in the very heart of the best new residence district now, and that's where the New House is, right next door to them—and I must say it makes their place look rather shabby! I met Mary Vertrees when I joined the Mission Service Helpers, but she never did any more than just barely bow to me, and since papa's break I doubt if she'll do that! They haven't called.”
“And you think if I spread this gossip about Vertrees the First stealing Dan'l Boone's gun, the chances that they WILL call—”
“Papa knows what a break he made with Mrs. Vertrees. I made him understand that,” said Edith, demurely, “and he's promised to try and meet Mr. Vertrees and be nice to him. It's just this way: if we don't know THEM, it's practically no use in our having built the New House; and if we DO know them and they're decent to us, we're right with the right people. They can do the whole thing for us. Bobby Lamhorn told Sibyl he was going to bring his mother to call on her and on mamma, but it was weeks ago, and I notice he hasn't done it; and if Mrs. Vertrees decides not to know us, I'm darn sure Mrs Lamhorn'll never come. That's ONE thing Sibyl didn't manage! She SAID Bobby offered to bring his mother—”
“You say he is a friend of Roscoe's?” Bibbs asked.
“Oh, he's a friend of the whole family,” she returned, with a petulance which she made an effort to disguise. “Roscoe and he got acquainted somewhere, and they take him to the theater about every other night. Sibyl has him to lunch, too, and keeps—” She broke off with an angry little jerk of the head. “We can see the New House from the second corner ahead. Roscoe has built straight across the street from us, you know. Honestly, Sibyl makes me think of a snake, sometimes—the way she pulls the wool over people's eyes! She honeys up to papa and gets anything in the world she wants out of him, and then makes fun of him behind his back—yes, and to his face, but HE can't see it! She got him to give her a twelve-thousand-dollar porch for their house after it was—”
“Good heavens!” said Bibbs, staring ahead as they reached the corner and the car swung to the right, following a bend in the street. “Is that the New House?”
“Yes. What do you think of it?”
“Well,” he drawled, “I'm pretty sure the sanitarium's about half a size bigger; I can't be certain till I measure.”
And a moment later, as they entered the driveway, he added, seriously: “But it's beautiful!”
CHAPTER IV
It was gray stone, with long roofs of thick green slate. An architect who loved the milder “Gothic motives” had built what he liked: it was to be seen at once that he had been left unhampered, and he had wrought a picture out of his head into a noble and exultant reality. At the same time a landscape-designer had played so good a second, with ready-made accessories of screen, approach and vista, that already whatever look of newness remained upon the place was to its advantage, as showing at least one thing yet clean under the grimy sky. For, though the smoke was thinner in this direction, and at this long distance from the heart of the town, it was not absent, and under tutelage of wind and weather could be malignant even here, where cows had wandered in the meadows and corn had been growing not ten years gone.
Altogether, the New House was a success. It was one of those architects' successes which leave the owners veiled in privacy; it revealed nothing of the people who lived in it save that they were rich. There are houses that cannot be detached from their own people without protesting: every inch of mortar seems to mourn the separation, and such a house—no matter what be done to it—is ever murmurous with regret, whispering the old name sadly to itself unceasingly. But the New House was of a kind to change hands without emotion. In our swelling cities, great places of its type are useful as financial gauges of the business tides; rich families, one after another, take title and occupy such houses as fortunes rise and fall—they mark the high tide. It was impossible to imagine a child's toy wagon left upon a walk or driveway of the New House, and yet it was—as Bibbs rightly called it—“beautiful.”
What the architect thought of the “Golfo di Napoli,” which hung in its vast gold revel of rococo frame against the gray wood of the hall, is to be conjectured—perhaps he had not seen it.
“Edith, did you say only eleven feet?” Bibbs panted, staring at it, as the white-jacketed twin of a Pullman porter helped him to get out of his overcoat.
“Eleven without the frame,” she explained. “It's splendid, don't you think? It lightens things up so. The hall was kind of gloomy before.”
“No gloom now!” said Bibbs.
“This statue in the corner is pretty, too,” she remarked. “Mamma and I bought that.” And Bibbs turned at her direction to behold, amid a grove of tubbed palms, a “life-size,” black-bearded Moor, of a plastic composition painted with unappeasable gloss and brilliancy. Upon his chocolate head he wore a gold turban; in his hand he held a gold-tipped spear; and for the rest, he was red and yellow and black and silver.
“Hallelujah!” was the sole comment of the returned wanderer, and Edith, saying she would “find mamma,” left him blinking at the Moor. Presently, after she had disappeared, he turned to the colored man who stood waiting, Bibbs's traveling-bag in his hand. “What do YOU think of it?” Bibbs asked, solemnly.
“Gran'!” replied the servitor. “She mighty hard to dus'. Dus' git in all 'em wrinkles. Yessuh, she mighty hard to dus'.”
“I expect she must be,” said Bibbs, his glance returning reflectively to the black bull beard for a moment. “Is there a place anywhere I could lie down?”
“Yessuh. We got one nem spare rooms all fix up fo' you, suh. Right up staihs, suh. Nice room.”
He led the way, and Bibbs followed slowly, stopping at intervals to rest, and noting a heavy increase in the staff of service since the exodus from the “old” house. Maids and scrubwomen were at work under the patently nominal direction of another Pullman porter, who was profoundly enjoying his own affectation of being harassed with care.
“Ev'ything got look spick an' span fo' the big doin's to-night,” Bibbs's guide explained, chuckling. “Yessuh, we got big doin's to-night! Big doin's!”
The room to which he conducted his lagging charge was furnished in every particular like a room in a new hotel; and Bibbs found it pleasant—though, indeed, any room with a good bed would have seemed pleasant to him after his journey. He stretched himself flat immediately, and having replied “Not now” to the attendant's offer to unpack the bag, closed his eyes wearily.
White-jacket, racially sympathetic, lowered the window-shades and made an exit on tiptoe, encountering the other white-jacket—the harassed overseer—in the hall without. Said the emerging one: “He mighty shaky, Mist' Jackson. Drop right down an' shet his eyes. Eyelids all black. Rich folks gotta go same as anybody else. Anybody ast me if I change 'ith 'at ole boy—No, suh! Le'm keep 'is money; I keep my black skin an' keep out the ground!”
Mr. Jackson expressed the same preference. “Yessuh, he look tuh me like somebody awready laid out,” he concluded. And upon the stairway landing, near by, two old women, on all-fours at their work, were likewise pessimistic.
“Hech!” said one, lamenting in a whisper. “It give me a turn to see him go by—white as wax an' bony as a dead fish! Mrs. Cronin, tell me: d'it make ye kind o' sick to look at um?”
“Sick? No more than the face of a blessed angel already in heaven!”
“Well,” said the other, “I'd a b'y o' me own come home t' die once—” She fell silent at a rustling of skirts in the corridor above them.
It was Mrs. Sheridan hurrying to greet her son.
She was one of those fat, pink people who fade and contract with age like drying fruit; and her outside was a true portrait of her. Her husband and her daughter had long ago absorbed her. What intelligence she had was given almost wholly to comprehending and serving those two, and except in the presence of one of them she was nearly always absent-minded. Edith lived all day with her mother, as daughters do; and Sheridan so held his wife to her unity with him that she had long ago become unconscious of her existence as a thing separate from his. She invariably perceived his moods, and nursed him through them when she did not share them; and she gave him a profound sympathy with the inmost spirit and purpose of his being, even though she did not comprehend it and partook of it only as a spectator. They had known but one actual altercation in their lives, and that was thirty years past, in the early days of Sheridan's struggle, when, in order to enhance the favorable impression he believed himself to be making upon some capitalists, he had thought it necessary to accompany them to a performance of “The Black Crook.” But she had not once referred to this during the last ten years.
Mrs. Sheridan's manner was hurried and inconsequent; her clothes rustled more than other women's clothes; she seemed to wear too many at a time and to be vaguely troubled by them, and she was patting a skirt down over some unruly internal dissension at the moment she opened Bibbs's door.
At sight of the recumbent figure she began to close the door softly, withdrawing, but the young man had heard the turning of the knob and the rustling of skirts, and he opened his eyes.
“Don't go, mother,” he said. “I'm not asleep.” He swung his long legs over the side of the bed to rise, but she set a hand on his shoulder, restraining him; and he lay flat again.
“No,” she said, bending over to kiss his cheek, “I just come for a minute, but I want to see how you seem. Edith said—”
“Poor Edith!” he murmured. “She couldn't look at me. She—”
“Nonsense!” Mrs. Sheridan, having let in the light at a window, came back to the bedside. “You look a great deal better than what you did before you went to the sanitarium, anyway. It's done you good; a body can see that right away. You need fatting up, of course, and you haven't got much color—”
“No,” he said, “I haven't much color.”
“But you will have when you get your strength back.”
“Oh yes!” he responded, cheerfully. “THEN I will.”
“You look a great deal better than what I expected.”
“Edith must have a great vocabulary!” he chuckled.
“She's too sensitive,” said Mrs. Sheridan, “and it makes her exaggerate a little. What about your diet?”
“That's all right. They told me to eat anything.”
“Anything at all?”
“Well—anything I could.”
“That's good,” she said, nodding. “They mean for you just to build up your strength. That's what they told me the last time I went to see you at the sanitarium. You look better than what you did then, and that's only a little time ago. How long was it?”
“Eight months, I think.”
“No, it couldn't be. I know it ain't THAT long, but maybe it was longer'n I thought. And this last month or so I haven't had scarcely even time to write more than just a line to ask how you were gettin' along, but I told Edith to write, the weeks I couldn't, and I asked Jim to, too, and they both said they would, so I suppose you've kept up pretty well on the home news.”
“Oh yes.”
“What I think you need,” said the mother, gravely, “is to liven up a little and take an interest in things. That's what papa was sayin' this morning, after we got your telegram; and that's what'll stimilate your appetite, too. He was talkin' over his plans for you—”
“Plans?” Bibbs, turning on his side, shielded his eyes from the light with his hand, so that he might see her better. “What—” He paused. “What plans is he making for me, mother?”
She turned away, going back to the window to draw down the shade. “Well, you better talk it over with HIM,” she said, with perceptible nervousness. “He better tell you himself. I don't feel as if I had any call, exactly, to go into it; and you better get to sleep now, anyway.” She came and stood by the bedside once more. “But you must remember, Bibbs, whatever papa does is for the best. He loves his chuldern and wants to do what's right by ALL of 'em—and you'll always find he's right in the end.”
He made a little gesture of assent, which seemed to content her; and she rustled to the door, turning to speak again after she had opened it. “You get a good nap, now, so as to be all rested up for to-night.”
“You—you mean—he—” Bibbs stammered, having begun to speak too quickly. Checking himself, he drew a long breath, then asked, quietly, “Does father expect me to come down-stairs this evening?”
“Well, I think he does,” she answered. “You see, it's the 'house-warming,' as he calls it, and he said he thinks all our chuldern ought to be around us, as well as the old friends and other folks. It's just what he thinks you need—to take an interest and liven up. You don't feel too bad to come down, do you?”
“Mother?”
“Well?”
“Take a good look at me,” he said.
“Oh, see here!” she cried, with brusque cheerfulness. “You're not so bad off as you think you are, Bibbs. You're on the mend; and it won't do you any harm to please your—”
“It isn't that,” he interrupted. “Honestly, I'm only afraid it might spoil somebody's appetite. Edith—”
“I told you the child was too sensitive,” she interrupted, in turn. “You're a plenty good-lookin' enough young man for anybody! You look like you been through a long spell and begun to get well, and that's all there is to it.”
“All right. I'll come to the party. If the rest of you can stand it, I can!”
“It 'll do you good,” she returned, rustling into the hall. “Now take a nap, and I'll send one o' the help to wake you in time for you to get dressed up before dinner. You go to sleep right away, now, Bibbs!”
Bibbs was unable to obey, though he kept his eyes closed. Something she had said kept running in his mind, repeating itself over and over interminably. “His plans for you—his plans for you—his plans for you—his plans for you—” And then, taking the place of “his plans for you,” after what seemed a long, long while, her flurried voice came back to him insistently, seeming to whisper in his ear: “He loves his chuldern—he loves his chuldern—he loves his chuldern”—“you'll find he's always right—you'll find he's always right—” Until at last, as he drifted into the state of half-dreams and distorted realities, the voice seemed to murmur from beyond a great black wing that came out of the wall and stretched over his bed—it was a black wing within the room, and at the same time it was a black cloud crossing the sky, bridging the whole earth from pole to pole. It was a cloud of black smoke, and out of the heart of it came a flurried voice whispering over and over, “His plans for you—his plans for you—his plans for you—” And then there was nothing.
He woke refreshed, stretched himself gingerly—as one might have a care against too quick or too long a pull upon a frayed elastic—and, getting to his feet, went blinking to the window and touched the shade so that it flew up, letting in a pale sunset.
He looked out into the lemon-colored light and smiled wanly at the next house, as Edith's grandiose phrase came to mind, “the old Vertrees country mansion.” It stood in a broad lawn which was separated from the Sheridans' by a young hedge; and it was a big, square, plain old box of a house with a giant salt-cellar atop for a cupola. Paint had been spared for a long time, and no one could have put a name to the color of it, but in spite of that the place had no look of being out at heel, and the sward was as neatly trimmed as the Sheridans' own.
The separating hedge ran almost beneath Bibbs's window—for this wing of the New House extended here almost to the edge of the lot—and, directly opposite the window, the Vertreeses' lawn had been graded so as to make a little knoll upon which stood a small rustic “summer-house.” It was almost on a level with Bibbs's window and not thirty feet away; and it was easy for him to imagine the present dynasty of Vertreeses in grievous outcry when they had found this retreat ruined by the juxtaposition of the parvenu intruder. Probably the “summer-house” was pleasant and pretty in summer. It had the look of a place wherein little girls had played for a generation or so with dolls and “housekeeping,” or where a lovely old lady might come to read something dull on warm afternoons; but now in the thin light it was desolate, the color of dust, and hung with haggard vines which had lost their leaves.
Bibbs looked at it with grave sympathy, probably feeling some kinship with anything so dismantled; then he turned to a cheval-glass beside the window and paid himself the dubious tribute of a thorough inspection. He looked the mirror up and down, slowly, repeatedly, but came in the end to a long and earnest scrutiny of the face. Throughout this cryptic seance his manner was profoundly impersonal; he had the air of an entomologist intent upon classifying a specimen, but finally he appeared to become pessimistic. He shook his head solemnly; then gazed again and shook his head again, and continued to shake it slowly, in complete disapproval.
“You certainly are one horrible sight!” he said, aloud.
And at that he was instantly aware of an observer. Turning quickly, he was vouchsafed the picture of a charming lady, framed in a rustic aperture of the “summer-house” and staring full into his window—straight into his eyes, too, for the infinitesimal fraction of a second before the flashingly censorious withdrawal of her own. Composedly, she pulled several dead twigs from a vine, the manner of her action conveying a message or proclamation to the effect that she was in the summer-house for the sole purpose of such-like pruning and tending, and that no gentleman could suppose her presence there to be due to any other purpose whatsoever, or that, being there on that account, she had allowed her attention to wander for one instant in the direction of things of which she was in reality unconscious.
Having pulled enough twigs to emphasize her unconsciousness—and at the same time her disapproval—of everything in the nature of a Sheridan or belonging to a Sheridan, she descended the knoll with maintained composure, and sauntered toward a side-door of the country mansion of the Vertreeses. An elderly lady, bonneted and cloaked, opened the door and came to meet her.
“Are you ready, Mary? I've been looking for you. What were you doing?”
“Nothing. Just looking into one of Sheridans' windows,” said Mary Vertrees. “I got caught at it.”
“Mary!” cried her mother. “Just as we were going to call! Good heavens!”
“We'll go, just the same,” the daughter returned. “I suppose those women would be glad to have us if we'd burned their house to the ground.”
“But WHO saw you?” insisted Mrs. Vertrees.
“One of the sons, I suppose he was. I believe he's insane, or something. At least I hear they keep him in a sanitarium somewhere, and never talk about him. He was staring at himself in a mirror and talking to himself. Then he looked out and caught me.”
“What did he—”
“Nothing, of course.”
“How did he look?”
“Like a ghost in a blue suit,” said Miss Vertrees, moving toward the street and waving a white-gloved hand in farewell to her father, who was observing them from the window of his library. “Rather tragic and altogether impossible. Do come on, mother, and let's get it over!”
And Mrs. Vertrees, with many misgivings, set forth with her daughter for their gracious assault upon the New House next door.
CHAPTER V
Mr. Vertrees, having watched their departure with the air of a man who had something at hazard upon the expedition, turned from the window and began to pace the library thoughtfully, pending their return. He was about sixty; a small man, withered and dry and fine, a trim little sketch of an elderly dandy. His lambrequin mustache—relic of a forgotten Anglomania—had been profoundly black, but now, like his smooth hair, it was approaching an equally sheer whiteness; and though his clothes were old, they had shapeliness and a flavor of mode. And for greater spruceness there were some jaunty touches; gray spats, a narrow black ribbon across the gray waistcoat to the eye-glasses in a pocket, a fleck of color from a button in the lapel of the black coat, labeling him the descendant of patriot warriors.
The room was not like him, being cheerful and hideous, whereas Mr. Vertrees was anxious and decorative. Under a mantel of imitation black marble a merry little coal-fire beamed forth upon high and narrow “Eastlake” bookcases with long glass doors, and upon comfortable, incongruous furniture, and upon meaningless “woodwork” everywhere, and upon half a dozen Landseer engravings which Mr. and Mrs. Vertrees sometimes mentioned to each other, after thirty years of possession, as “very fine things.” They had been the first people in town to possess Landseer engravings, and there, in art, they had rested, but they still had a feeling that in all such matters they were in the van; and when Mr. Vertrees discovered Landseers upon the walls of other people's houses he thawed, as a chieftain to a trusted follower; and if he found an edition of Bulwer Lytton accompanying the Landseers as a final corroboration of culture, he would say, inevitably, “Those people know good pictures and they know good books.”
The growth of the city, which might easily have made him a millionaire, had ruined him because he had failed to understand it. When towns begin to grow they have whims, and the whims of a town always ruin somebody. Mr. Vertrees had been most strikingly the somebody in this case. At about the time he bought the Landseers, he owned, through inheritance, an office-building and a large house not far from it, where he spent the winter; and he had a country place—a farm of four hundred acres—where he went for the summers to the comfortable, ugly old house that was his home now, perforce, all the year round. If he had known how to sit still and let things happen he would have prospered miraculously; but, strangely enough, the dainty little man was one of the first to fall down and worship Bigness, the which proceeded straightway to enact the role of Juggernaut for his better education. He was a true prophet of the prodigious growth, but he had a fatal gift for selling good and buying bad. He should have stayed at home and looked at his Landseers and read his Bulwer, but he took his cow to market, and the trained milkers milked her dry and then ate her. He sold the office-building and the house in town to buy a great tract of lots in a new suburb; then he sold the farm, except the house and the ground about it, to pay the taxes on the suburban lots and to “keep them up.” The lots refused to stay up; but he had to do something to keep himself and his family up, so in despair he sold the lots (which went up beautifully the next year) for “traction stock” that was paying dividends; and thereafter he ceased to buy and sell. Thus he disappeared altogether from the commercial surface at about the time James Sheridan came out securely on top; and Sheridan, until Mrs. Vertrees called upon him with her “anti-smoke” committee, had never heard the name.
Mr. Vertrees, pinched, retired to his Landseers, and Mrs. Vertrees “managed somehow” on the dividends, though “managing” became more and more difficult as the years went by and money bought less and less. But there came a day when three servitors of Bigness in Philadelphia took greedy counsel with four fellow-worshipers from New York, and not long after that there were no more dividends for Mr. Vertrees. In fact, there was nothing for Mr. Vertrees, because the “traction stock” henceforth was no stock at all, and he had mortgaged his house long ago to help “manage somehow” according to his conception of his “position in life”—one of his own old-fashioned phrases. Six months before the completion of the New House next door, Mr. Vertrees had sold his horses and the worn Victoria and “station-wagon,” to pay the arrears of his two servants and re-establish credit at the grocer's and butcher's—and a pair of elderly carriage-horses with such accoutrements are not very ample barter, in these days, for six months' food and fuel and service. Mr. Vertrees had discovered, too, that there was no salary for him in all the buzzing city—he could do nothing.
It may be said that he was at the end of his string. Such times do come in all their bitterness, finally, to the man with no trade or craft, if his feeble clutch on that slippery ghost, Property, shall fail.
The windows grew black while he paced the room, and smoky twilight closed round about the house, yet not more darkly than what closed round about the heart of the anxious little man patrolling the fan-shaped zone of firelight. But as the mantel clock struck wheezily six there was the rattle of an outer door, and a rich and beautiful peal of laughter went ringing through the house. Thus cheerfully did Mary Vertrees herald her return with her mother from their expedition among the barbarians.
She came rushing into the library and threw herself into a deep chair by the hearth, laughing so uncontrollably that tears were in her eyes. Mrs. Vertrees followed decorously, no mirth about her; on the contrary, she looked vaguely disturbed, as if she had eaten something not quite certain to agree with her, and regretted it.
“Papa! Oh, oh!” And Miss Vertrees was fain to apply a handkerchief upon her eyes. “I'm SO glad you made us go! I wouldn't have missed it—”
Mrs. Vertrees shook her head. “I suppose I'm very dull,” she said, gently. “I didn't see anything amusing. They're most ordinary, and the house is altogether in bad taste, but we anticipated that, and—”
“Papa!” Mary cried, breaking in. “They asked us to DINNER!”
“What!”
“And I'm GOING!” she shouted, and was seized with fresh paroxysms. “Think of it! Never in their house before; never met any of them but the daughter—and just BARELY met her—”
“What about you?” interrupted Mr. Vertrees, turning sharply upon his wife.
She made a little face as if positive now that what she had eaten would not agree with her. “I couldn't!” she said. “I—”
“Yes, that's just—just the way she—she looked when they asked her!” cried Mary, choking. “And then she—she realized it, and tried to turn it into a cough, and she didn't know how, and it sounded like—like a squeal!”
“I suppose,” said Mrs. Vertrees, much injured, “that Mary will have an uproarious time at my funeral. She makes fun of—”
Mary jumped up instantly and kissed her; then she went to the mantel and, leaning an elbow upon it, gazed thoughtfully at the buckle of her shoe, twinkling in the firelight.
“THEY didn't notice anything,” she said. “So far as they were concerned, mamma, it was one of the finest coughs you ever coughed.”
“Who were 'they'?” asked her father. “Whom did you see?”
“Only the mother and daughter,” Mary answered. “Mrs. Sheridan is dumpy and rustly; and Miss Sheridan is pretty and pushing—dresses by the fashion magazines and talks about New York people that have their pictures in 'em. She tutors the mother, but not very successfully—partly because her own foundation is too flimsy and partly because she began too late. They've got an enormous Moor of painted plaster or something in the hall, and the girl evidently thought it was to her credit that she selected it!”
“They have oil-paintings, too,” added Mrs. Vertrees, with a glance of gentle pride at the Landseers. “I've always thought oil-paintings in a private house the worst of taste.”
“Oh, if one owned a Raphael or a Titian!” said Mr. Vertrees, finishing the implication, not in words, but with a wave of his hand. “Go on, Mary. None of the rest of them came in? You didn't meet Mr. Sheridan or—” He paused and adjusted a lump of coal in the fire delicately with the poker. “Or one of the sons?”
Mary's glance crossed his, at that, with a flash of utter comprehension. He turned instantly away, but she had begun to laugh again.
“No,” she said, “no one except the women, but mamma inquired about the sons thoroughly!”
“Mary!” Mrs. Vertrees protested.
“Oh, most adroitly, too!” laughed the girl. “Only she couldn't help unconsciously turning to look at me—when she did it!”
“Mary Vertrees!”
“Never mind, mamma! Mrs. Sheridan and Miss Sheridan neither of THEM could help unconsciously turning to look at me—speculatively—at the same time! They all three kept looking at me and talking about the oldest son, Mr. James Sheridan, Junior. Mrs. Sheridan said his father is very anxious 'to get Jim to marry and settle down,' and she assured me that 'Jim is right cultivated.' Another of the sons, the youngest one, caught me looking in the window this afternoon; but they didn't seem to consider him quite one of themselves, somehow, though Mrs. Sheridan mentioned that a couple of years or so ago he had been 'right sick,' and had been to some cure or other. They seemed relieved to bring the subject back to 'Jim' and his virtues—and to look at me! The other brother is the middle one, Roscoe; he's the one that owns the new house across the street, where that young black-sheep of the Lamhorns, Robert, goes so often. I saw a short, dark young man standing on the porch with Robert Lamhorn there the other day, so I suppose that was Roscoe. 'Jim' still lurks in the mists, but I shall meet him to-night. Papa—” She stepped nearer to him so that he had to face her, and his eyes were troubled as he did. There may have been a trouble deep within her own, but she kept their surface merry with laughter. “Papa, Bibbs is the youngest one's name, and Bibbs—to the best of our information—is a lunatic. Roscoe is married. Papa, does it have to be Jim?”
“Mary!” Mrs. Vertrees cried, sharply. “You're outrageous! That's a perfectly horrible way of talking!”
“Well, I'm close to twenty-four,” said Mary, turning to her. “I haven't been able to like anybody yet that's asked me to marry him, and maybe I never shall. Until a year or so ago I've had everything I ever wanted in my life—you and papa gave it all to me—and it's about time I began to pay back. Unfortunately, I don't know how to do anything—but something's got to be done.”
“But you needn't talk of it like THAT!” insisted the mother, plaintively. “It's not—it's not—”
“No, it's not,” said Mary. “I know that!”
“How did they happen to ask you to dinner?” Mr. Vertrees inquired, uneasily. “'Stextrawdn'ry thing!”
“Climbers' hospitality,” Mary defined it. “We were so very cordial and easy! I think Mrs. Sheridan herself might have done it just as any kind old woman on a farm might ask a neighbor, but it was Miss Sheridan who did it. She played around it awhile; you could see she wanted to—she's in a dreadful hurry to get into things—and I fancied she had an idea it might impress that Lamhorn boy to find us there to-night. It's a sort of house-warming dinner, and they talked about it and talked about it—and then the girl got her courage up and blurted out the invitation. And mamma—” Here Mary was once more a victim to incorrigible merriment. “Mamma tried to say yes, and COULDN'T! She swallowed and squealed—I mean you coughed, dear! And then, papa, she said that you and she had promised to go to a lecture at the Emerson Club to-night, but that her daughter would be delighted to come to the Big Show! So there I am, and there's Mr. Jim Sheridan—and there's the clock. Dinner's at seven-thirty!”
And she ran out of the room, scooping up her fallen furs with a gesture of flying grace as she sped.
When she came down, at twenty minutes after seven, her father stood in the hall, at the foot of the stairs, waiting to be her escort through the dark. He looked up and watched her as she descended, and his gaze was fond and proud—and profoundly disturbed. But she smiled and nodded gaily, and, when she reached the floor, put a hand on his shoulder.
“At least no one could suspect me to-night,” she said. “I LOOK rich, don't I, papa?”
She did. She had a look that worshipful girl friends bravely called “regal.” A head taller than her father, she was as straight and jauntily poised as a boy athlete; and her brown hair and her brown eyes were like her mother's, but for the rest she went back to some stronger and livelier ancestor than either of her parents.
“Don't I look too rich to be suspected?” she insisted.
“You look everything beautiful, Mary,” he said, huskily.
“And my dress?” She threw open her dark velvet cloak, showing a splendor of white and silver. “Anything better at Nice next winter, do you think?” She laughed, shrouding her glittering figure in the cloak again. “Two years old, and no one would dream it! I did it over.”
“You can do anything, Mary.”
There was a curious humility in his tone, and something more—a significance not veiled and yet abysmally apologetic. It was as if he suggested something to her and begged her forgiveness in the same breath.
And upon that, for the moment, she became as serious as he. She lifted her hand from his shoulder and then set it back more firmly, so that he should feel the reassurance of its pressure.
“Don't worry,” she said, in a low voice and gravely. “I know exactly what you want me to do.”
CHAPTER VI
It was a brave and lustrous banquet; and a noisy one, too, because there was an orchestra among some plants at one end of the long dining-room, and after a preliminary stiffness the guests were impelled to converse—necessarily at the tops of their voices. The whole company of fifty sat at a great oblong table, improvised for the occasion by carpenters; but, not betraying itself as an improvisation, it seemed a permanent continent of damask and lace, with shores of crystal and silver running up to spreading groves of orchids and lilies and white roses—an inhabited continent, evidently, for there were three marvelous, gleaming buildings: one in the center and one at each end, white miracles wrought by some inspired craftsman in sculptural icing. They were models in miniature, and they represented the Sheridan Building, the Sheridan Apartments, and the Pump Works. Nearly all the guests recognized them without having to be told what they were, and pronounced the likenesses superb.
The arrangement of the table was visibly baronial. At the head sat the great Thane, with the flower of his family and of the guests about him; then on each side came the neighbors of the “old” house, grading down to vassals and retainers—superintendents, cashiers, heads of departments, and the like—at the foot, where the Thane's lady took her place as a consolation for the less important. Here, too, among the thralls and bondmen, sat Bibbs Sheridan, a meek Banquo, wondering how anybody could look at him and eat.
Nevertheless, there was a vast, continuous eating, for these were wholesome folk who understood that dinner meant something intended for introduction into the system by means of an aperture in the face, devised by nature for that express purpose. And besides, nobody looked at Bibbs.
He was better content to be left to himself; his voice was not strong enough to make itself heard over the hubbub without an exhausting effort, and the talk that went on about him was too fast and too fragmentary for his drawl to keep pace with it. So he felt relieved when each of his neighbors in turn, after a polite inquiry about his health, turned to seek livelier responses in other directions. For the talk went on with the eating, incessantly. It rose over the throbbing of the orchestra and the clatter and clinking of silver and china and glass, and there was a mighty babble.
“Yes, sir! Started without a dollar.”... “Yellow flounces on the overskirt—“... “I says, 'Wilkie, your department's got to go bigger this year,' I says.”... “Fifteen per cent. turnover in thirty-one weeks.”... “One of the biggest men in the biggest—“... “The wife says she'll have to let out my pants if my appetite—“... “Say, did you see that statue of a Turk in the hall? One of the finest things I ever—“... “Not a dollar, not a nickel, not one red cent do you get out o' me,' I says, and so he ups and—“... “Yes, the baby makes four, they've lost now.”... “Well, they got their raise, and they went in big.”... “Yes, sir! Not a dollar to his name, and look at what—“... “You wait! The population of this town's goin' to hit the million mark before she stops.”... “Well, if you can show me a bigger deal than—”
And through the interstices of this clamoring Bibbs could hear the continual booming of his father's heavy voice, and once he caught the sentence, “Yes, young lady, that's just what did it for me, and that's just what'll do it for my boys—they got to make two blades o' grass grow where one grew before!” It was his familiar flourish, an old story to Bibbs, and now jovially declaimed for the edification of Mary Vertrees.
It was a great night for Sheridan—the very crest of his wave. He sat there knowing himself Thane and master by his own endeavor; and his big, smooth, red face grew more and more radiant with good will and with the simplest, happiest, most boy-like vanity. He was the picture of health, of good cheer, and of power on a holiday. He had thirty teeth, none bought, and showed most of them when he laughed; his grizzled hair was thick, and as unruly as a farm laborer's; his chest was deep and big beneath its vast facade of starched white linen, where little diamonds twinkled, circling three large pearls; his hands were stubby and strong, and he used them freely in gestures of marked picturesqueness; and, though he had grown fat at chin and waist and wrist, he had not lost the look of readiness and activity.
He dominated the table, shouting jocular questions and railleries at every one. His idea was that when people were having a good time they were noisy; and his own additions to the hubbub increased his pleasure, and, of course, met the warmest encouragement from his guests. Edith had discovered that he had very foggy notions of the difference between a band and an orchestra, and when it was made clear to him he had held out for a band until Edith threatened tears; but the size of the orchestra they hired consoled him, and he had now no regrets in the matter.
He kept time to the music continually—with his feet, or pounding on the table with his fist, and sometimes with spoon or knife upon his plate or a glass, without permitting these side-products to interfere with the real business of eating and shouting.
“Tell 'em to play 'Nancy Lee'!” he would bellow down the length of the table to his wife, while the musicians were in the midst of the “Toreador” song, perhaps. “Ask that fellow if they don't know 'Nancy Lee'!” And when the leader would shake his head apologetically in answer to an obedient shriek from Mrs. Sheridan, the “Toreador” continuing vehemently, Sheridan would roar half-remembered fragments of “Nancy Lee,” naturally mingling some Bizet with the air of that uxorious tribute.
“Oh, there she stands and waves her hands while I'm away! A sail-er's wife a sail-er's star should be! Yo ho, oh, oh! Oh, Nancy, Nancy, Nancy Lee! Oh, Na-hancy Lee!”
“HAY, there, old lady!” he would bellow. “Tell 'em to play 'In the Gloaming.' In the gloaming, oh, my darling, la-la-lum-tee—Well, if they don't know that, what's the matter with 'Larboard Watch, Ahoy'? THAT'S good music! That's the kind o' music I like! Come on, now! Mrs. Callin, get 'em singin' down in your part o' the table. What's the matter you folks down there, anyway? Larboard watch, ahoy!”
“What joy he feels, as—ta-tum-dum-tee-dee-dum steals. La-a-r-board watch, ahoy!”
No external bubbling contributed to this effervescence; the Sheridans' table had never borne wine, and, more because of timidity about it than conviction, it bore none now; though “mineral waters” were copiously poured from bottles wrapped, for some reason, in napkins, and proved wholly satisfactory to almost all of the guests. And certainly no wine could have inspired more turbulent good spirits in the host. Not even Bibbs was an alloy in this night's happiness, for, as Mrs. Sheridan had said, he had “plans for Bibbs”—plans which were going to straighten out some things that had gone wrong.
So he pounded the table and boomed his echoes of old songs, and then, forgetting these, would renew his friendly railleries, or perhaps, turning to Mary Vertrees, who sat near him, round the corner of the table at his right, he would become autobiographical. Gentlemen less naive than he had paid her that tribute, for she was a girl who inspired the autobiographical impulse in every man who met her—it needed but the sight of her.
The dinner seemed, somehow, to center about Mary Vertrees and the jocund host as a play centers about its hero and heroine; they were the rubicund king and the starry princess of this spectacle—they paid court to each other, and everybody paid court to them. Down near the sugar Pump Works, where Bibbs sat, there was audible speculation and admiration. “Wonder who that lady is—makin' such a hit with the old man.” “Must be some heiress.” “Heiress? Golly, I guess I could stand it to marry rich, then!”
Edith and Sibyl were radiant: at first they had watched Miss Vertrees with an almost haggard anxiety, wondering what disasterous effect Sheridan's pastoral gaieties—and other things—would have upon her, but she seemed delighted with everything, and with him most of all. She treated him as if he were some delicious, foolish old joke that she understood perfectly, laughing at him almost violently when he bragged—probably his first experience of that kind in his life. It enchanted him.
As he proclaimed to the table, she had “a way with her.” She had, indeed, as Roscoe Sheridan, upon her right, discovered just after the feast began. Since his marriage three years before, no lady had bestowed upon him so protracted a full view of brilliant eyes; and, with the look, his lovely neighbor said—and it was her first speech to him—
“I hope you're very susceptible, Mr. Sheridan!”
Honest Roscoe was taken aback, and “Why?” was all he managed to say.
She repeated the look deliberately, which was noted, with a mystification equal to his own, by his sister across the table. No one, reflected Edith, could image Mary Vertrees the sort of girl who would “really flirt” with married men—she was obviously the “opposite of all that.” Edith defined her as a “thoroughbred,” a “nice girl”; and the look given to Roscoe was astounding. Roscoe's wife saw it, too, and she was another whom it puzzled—though not because its recipient was married.
“Because!” said Mary Vertrees, replying to Roscoe's monosyllable. “And also because we're next-door neighbors at table, and it's dull times ahead for both of us if we don't get along.”
Roscoe was a literal young man, all stocks and bonds, and he had been brought up to believe that when a man married he “married and settled down.” It was “all right,” he felt, for a man as old as his father to pay florid compliments to as pretty a girl as this Miss Vertrees, but for himself—“a young married man”—it wouldn't do; and it wouldn't even be quite moral. He knew that young married people might have friendships, like his wife's for Lamhorn; but Sibyl and Lamhorn never “flirted”—they were always very matter-of-fact with each other. Roscoe would have been troubled if Sibyl had ever told Lamhorn she hoped he was susceptible.
“Yes—we're neighbors,” he said, awkwardly.
“Next-door neighbors in houses, too,” she added.
“No, not exactly. I live across the street.”
“Why, no!” she exclaimed, and seemed startled. “Your mother told me this afternoon that you lived at home.”
“Yes, of course I live at home. I built that new house across the street.”
“But you—” she paused, confused, and then slowly a deep color came into her cheek. “But I understood—”
“No,” he said; “my wife and I lived with the old folks the first year, but that's all. Edith and Jim live with them, of course.”
“I—I see,” she said, the deep color still deepening as she turned from him and saw, written upon a card before the gentleman at her left the name, “Mr. James Sheridan, Jr.” And from that moment Roscoe had little enough cause for wondering what he ought to reply to her disturbing coquetries.
Mr. James Sheridan had been anxiously waiting for the dazzling visitor to “get through with old Roscoe,” as he thought of it, and give a bachelor a chance. “Old Roscoe” was the younger, but he had always been the steady wheel-horse of the family. Jim was “steady” enough, but was considered livelier than Roscoe, which in truth is not saying much for Jim's liveliness. As their father habitually boasted, both brothers were “capable, hard-working young business men,” and the principal difference between them was merely that which resulted from Jim's being still a bachelor. Physically they were of the same type: dark of eyes and of hair, fresh-colored and thick-set, and though Roscoe was several inches taller than Jim, neither was of the height, breadth, or depth of the father. Both wore young business men's mustaches, and either could have sat for the tailor-shop lithographs of young business men wearing “rich suitings in dark mixtures.”
Jim, approving warmly of his neighbor's profile, perceived her access of color, which increased his approbation. “What's that old Roscoe saying to you, Miss Vertrees?” he asked. “These young married men are mighty forward nowadays, but you mustn't let 'em make you blush.”
“Am I blushing?” she said. “Are you sure?” And with that she gave him ample opportunity to make sure, repeating with interest the look wasted upon Roscoe. “I think you must be mistaken,” she continued. “I think it's your brother who is blushing. I've thrown him into confusion.”
“How?”
She laughed, and then, leaning to him a little, said in a tone as confidential as she could make it, under cover of the uproar. “By trying to begin with him a courtship I meant for YOU!”
This might well be a style new to Jim; and it was. He supposed it a nonsensical form of badinage, and yet it took his breath. He realized that he wished what she said to be the literal truth, and he was instantly snared by that realization.
“By George!” he said. “I guess you're the kind of girl that can say anything—yes, and get away with it, too!”
She laughed again—in her way, so that he could not tell whether she was laughing at him or at herself or at the nonsense she was talking; and she said: “But you see I don't care whether I get away with it or not. I wish you'd tell me frankly if you think I've got a chance to get away with YOU?”
“More like if you've got a chance to get away FROM me!” Jim was inspired to reply. “Not one in the world, especially after beginning by making fun of me like that.”
“I mightn't be so much in fun as you think,” she said, regarding him with sudden gravity.
“Well,” said Jim, in simple honesty, “you're a funny girl!”
Her gravity continued an instant longer. “I may not turn out to be funny for YOU.”
“So long as you turn out to be anything at all for me, I expect I can manage to be satisfied.” And with that, to his own surprise, it was his turn to blush, whereupon she laughed again.
“Yes,” he said, plaintively, not wholly lacking intuition, “I can see you're the sort of girl that would laugh the minute you see a man really means anything!”
“'Laugh'!” she cried, gaily. “Why, it might be a matter of life and death! But if you want tragedy, I'd better put the question at once, considering the mistake I made with your brother.”
Jim was dazed. She seemed to be playing a little game of mockery and nonsense with him, but he had glimpses of a flashing danger in it; he was but too sensible of being outclassed, and had somewhere a consciousness that he could never quite know this giddy and alluring lady, no matter how long it pleased her to play with him. But he mightily wanted her to keep on playing with him.
“Put what question?” he said, breathlessly.
“As you are a new neighbor of mine and of my family,” she returned, speaking slowly and with a cross-examiner's severity, “I think it would be well for me to know at once whether you are already walking out with any young lady or not. Mr. Sheridan, think well! Are you spoken for?”
“Not yet,” he gasped. “Are you?”
“NO!” she cried, and with that they both laughed again; and the pastime proceeded, increasing both in its gaiety and in its gravity.
Observing its continuance, Mr. Robert Lamhorn, opposite, turned from a lively conversation with Edith and remarked covertly to Sibyl that Miss Vertrees was “starting rather picturesquely with Jim.” And he added, languidly, “Do you suppose she WOULD?”
For the moment Sibyl gave no sign of having heard him, but seemed interested in the clasp of a long “rope” of pearls, a loop of which she was allowing to swing from her fingers, resting her elbow upon the table and following with her eyes the twinkle of diamonds and platinum in the clasp at the end of the loop. She wore many jewels. She was pretty, but hers was not the kind of prettiness to be loaded with too sumptuous accessories, and jeweled head-dresses are dangerous—they may emphasize the wrongness of the wearer.
“I said Miss Vertrees seems to be starting pretty strong with Jim,” repeated Mr. Lamhorn.
“I heard you.” There was a latent discontent always somewhere in her eyes, no matter what she threw upon the surface of cover it, and just now she did not care to cover it; she looked sullen. “Starting any stronger than you did with Edith?” she inquired.
“Oh, keep the peace!” he said, crossly. “That's off, of course.”
“You haven't been making her see it this evening—precisely,” said Sibyl, looking at him steadily. “You've talked to her for—”
“For Heaven's sake,” he begged, “keep the peace!”
“Well, what have you just been doing?”
“SH!” he said. “Listen to your father-in-law.”
Sheridan was booming and braying louder than ever, the orchestra having begun to play “The Rosary,” to his vast content.
“I COUNT THEM OVER, LA-LA-TUM-TEE-DUM,” he roared, beating the measures with his fork. “EACH HOUR A PEARL, EACH PEARL TEE-DUM-TUM-DUM—What's the matter with all you folks? Why'n't you SING? Miss Vertrees, I bet a thousand dollars YOU sing! Why'n't—”
“Mr. Sheridan,” she said, turning cheerfully from the ardent Jim, “you don't know what you interrupted! Your son isn't used to my rough ways, and my soldier's wooing frightens him, but I think he was about to say something important.”
“I'll say something important to him if he doesn't!” the father threatened, more delighted with her than ever. “By gosh! if I was his age—or a widower right NOW—”
“Oh, wait!” cried Mary. “If they'd only make less noise! I want Mrs. Sheridan to hear.”
“She'd say the same,” he shouted. “She'd tell me I was mighty slow if I couldn't get ahead o' Jim. Why, when I was his age—”
“You must listen to your father,” Mary interrupted, turning to Jim, who had grown red again. “He's going to tell us how, when he was your age, he made those two blades of grass grow out of a teacup—and you could see for yourself he didn't get them out of his sleeve!”
At that Sheridan pounded the table till it jumped. “Look here, young lady!” he roared. “Some o' these days I'm either goin' to slap you—or I'm goin' to kiss you!”
Edith looked aghast; she was afraid this was indeed “too awful,” but Mary Vertrees burst into ringing laughter.
“Both!” she cried. “Both! The one to make me forget the other!”
“But which—” he began, and then suddenly gave forth such stentorian trumpetings of mirth that for once the whole table stopped to listen. “Jim,” he roared, “if you don't propose to that girl to-night I'll send you back to the machine-shop with Bibbs!”
And Bibbs—down among the retainers by the sugar Pump Works, and watching Mary Vertrees as a ragged boy in the street might watch a rich little girl in a garden—Bibbs heard. He heard—and he knew what his father's plans were now.
CHAPTER VII
Mrs. Vertrees “sat up” for her daughter, Mr. Vertrees having retired after a restless evening, not much soothed by the society of his Landseers. Mary had taken a key, insisting that he should not come for her and seeming confident that she would not lack for escort; nor did the sequel prove her confidence unwarranted. But Mrs. Vertrees had a long vigil of it.
She was not the woman to make herself easy—no servant had ever seen her in a wrapper—and with her hair and dress and her shoes just what they had been when she returned from the afternoon's call, she sat through the slow night hours in a stiff little chair under the gaslight in her own room, which was directly over the “front hall.” There, book in hand, she employed the time in her own reminiscences, though it was her belief that she was reading Madame de Remusat's.
Her thoughts went backward into her life and into her husband's; and the deeper into the past they went, the brighter the pictures they brought her—and there is tragedy. Like her husband, she thought backward because she did not dare think forward definitely. What thinking forward this troubled couple ventured took the form of a slender hope which neither of them could have borne to hear put in words, and yet they had talked it over, day after day, from the very hour when they heard Sheridan was to build his New House next door. For—so quickly does any ideal of human behavior become an antique—their youth was of the innocent old days, so dead! of “breeding” and “gentility,” and no craft had been more straitly trained upon them than that of talking about things without mentioning them. Herein was marked the most vital difference between Mr. and Mrs. Vertrees and their big new neighbor. Sheridan, though his youth was of the same epoch, knew nothing of such matters. He had been chopping wood for the morning fire in the country grocery while they were still dancing.
It was after one o'clock when Mrs. Vertrees heard steps and the delicate clinking of the key in the lock, and then, with the opening of the door, Mary's laugh, and “Yes—if you aren't afraid—to-morrow!”
The door closed, and she rushed up-stairs, bringing with her a breath of cold and bracing air into her mother's room. “Yes,” she said, before Mrs. Vertrees could speak, “he brought me home!”
She let her cloak fall upon the bed, and, drawing an old red-velvet rocking-chair forward, sat beside her mother after giving her a light pat upon the shoulder and a hearty kiss upon the cheek.
“Mamma!” Mary exclaimed, when Mrs. Vertrees had expressed a hope that she had enjoyed the evening and had not caught cold. “Why don't you ask me?”
This inquiry obviously made her mother uncomfortable. “I don't—” she faltered. “Ask you what, Mary?”
“How I got along and what he's like.”
“Mary!”
“Oh, it isn't distressing!” said Mary. “And I got along so fast—” She broke off to laugh; continuing then, “But that's the way I went at it, of course. We ARE in a hurry, aren't we?”
“I don't know what you mean,” Mrs. Vertrees insisted, shaking her head plaintively.
“Yes,” said Mary, “I'm going out in his car with him to-morrow afternoon, and to the theater the next night—but I stopped it there. You see, after you give the first push, you must leave it to them while YOU pretend to run away!”
“My dear, I don't know what to—”
“What to make of anything!” Mary finished for her. “So that's all right! Now I'll tell you all about it. It was gorgeous and deafening and tee-total. We could have lived a year on it. I'm not good at figures, but I calculated that if we lived six months on poor old Charlie and Ned and the station-wagon and the Victoria, we could manage at least twice as long on the cost of the 'house-warming.' I think the orchids alone would have lasted us a couple of months. There they were, before me, but I couldn't steal 'em and sell 'em, and so—well, so I did what I could!”
She leaned back and laughed reassuringly to her troubled mother. “It seemed to be a success—what I could,” she said, clasping her hands behind her neck and stirring the rocker to motion as a rhythmic accompaniment to her narrative. “The girl Edith and her sister-in-law, Mrs. Roscoe Sheridan, were too anxious about the effect of things on me. The father's worth a bushel of both of them, if they knew it. He's what he is. I like him.” She paused reflectively, continuing, “Edith's 'interested' in that Lamhorn boy; he's good-looking and not stupid, but I think he's—” She interrupted herself with a cheery outcry: “Oh! I mustn't be calling him names! If he's trying to make Edith like him, I ought to respect him as a colleague.”
“I don't understand a thing you're talking about,” Mrs. Vertrees complained.
“All the better! Well, he's a bad lot, that Lamhorn boy; everybody's always known that, but the Sheridans don't know the everybodies that know. He sat between Edith and Mrs. Roscoe Sheridan. SHE'S like those people you wondered about at the theater, the last time we went—dressed in ball-gowns; bound to show their clothes and jewels SOMEwhere! She flatters the father, and so did I, for that matter—but not that way. I treated him outrageously!”
“Mary!”
“That's what flattered him. After dinner he made the whole regiment of us follow him all over the house, while he lectured like a guide on the Palatine. He gave dimensions and costs, and the whole b'ilin' of 'em listened as if they thought he intended to make them a present of the house. What he was proudest of was the plumbing and that Bay of Naples panorama in the hall. He made us look at all the plumbing—bath-rooms and everywhere else—and then he made us look at the Bay of Naples. He said it was a hundred and eleven feet long, but I think it's more. And he led us all into the ready-made library to see a poem Edith had taken a prize with at school. They'd had it printed in gold letters and framed in mother-of-pearl. But the poem itself was rather simple and wistful and nice—he read it to us, though Edith tried to stop him. She was modest about it, and said she'd never written anything else. And then, after a while, Mrs. Roscoe Sheridan asked me to come across the street to her house with them—her husband and Edith and Mr. Lamhorn and Jim Sheridan—”
Mrs. Vertrees was shocked. “'Jim'!” she exclaimed. “Mary, PLEASE—”
“Of course,” said Mary. “I'll make it as easy for you as I can, mamma. Mr. James Sheridan, Junior. We went over there, and Mrs. Roscoe explained that 'the men were all dying for a drink,' though I noticed that Mr. Lamhorn was the only one near death's door on that account. Edith and Mrs. Roscoe said they knew I'd been bored at the dinner. They were objectionably apologetic about it, and they seemed to think NOW we were going to have a 'good time' to make up for it. But I hadn't been bored at the dinner, I'd been amused; and the 'good time' at Mrs. Roscoe's was horribly, horribly stupid.”
“But, Mary,” her mother began, “is—is—” And she seemed unable to complete the question.
“Never mind, mamma. I'll say it. Is Mr. James Sheridan, Junior, stupid? I'm sure he's not at all stupid about business. Otherwise—Oh, what right have I to be calling people 'stupid' because they're not exactly my kind? On the big dinner-table they had enormous icing models of the Sheridan Building—”
“Oh, no!” Mrs. Vertrees cried. “Surely not!”
“Yes, and two other things of that kind—I don't know what. But, after all, I wondered if they were so bad. If I'd been at a dinner at a palace in Italy, and a relief or inscription on one of the old silver pieces had referred to some great deed or achievement of the family, I shouldn't have felt superior; I'd have thought it picturesque and stately—I'd have been impressed. And what's the real difference? The icing is temporary, and that's much more modest, isn't it? And why is it vulgar to feel important more on account of something you've done yourself than because of something one of your ancestors did? Besides, if we go back a few generations, we've all got such hundreds of ancestors it seems idiotic to go picking out one or two to be proud of ourselves about. Well, then, mamma, I managed not to feel superior to Mr. James Sheridan, Junior, because he didn't see anything out of place in the Sheridan Building in sugar.”
Mrs. Vertrees's expression had lost none of its anxiety pending the conclusion of this lively bit of analysis, and she shook her head gravely. “My dear, dear child,” she said, “it seems to me—It looks—I'm afraid—”
“Say as much of it as you can, mamma,” said Mary, encouragingly. “I can get it, if you'll just give me one key-word.”
“Everything you say,” Mrs. Vertrees began, timidly, “seems to have the air of—it is as if you were seeking to—to make yourself—”
“Oh, I see! You mean I sound as if I were trying to force myself to like him.”
“Not exactly, Mary. That wasn't quite what I meant,” said Mrs. Vertrees, speaking direct untruth with perfect unconsciousness. “But you said that—that you found the latter part of the evening at young Mrs. Sheridan's unentertaining—”
“And as Mr. James Sheridan was there, and I saw more of him than at dinner, and had a horribly stupid time in spite of that, you think I—” And then it was Mary who left the deduction unfinished.
Mrs. Vertrees nodded; and though both the mother and the daughter understood, Mary felt it better to make the understanding definite.
“Well,” she asked, gravely, “is there anything else I can do? You and papa don't want me to do anything that distresses me, and so, as this is the only thing to be done, it seems it's up to me not to let it distress me. That's all there is about it, isn't it?”
“But nothing MUST distress you!” the mother cried.
“That's what I say!” said Mary, cheerfully. “And so it doesn't. It's all right.” She rose and took her cloak over her arm, as if to go to her own room. But on the way to the door she stopped, and stood leaning against the foot of the bed, contemplating a threadbare rug at her feet. “Mother, you've told me a thousand times that it doesn't really matter whom a girl marries.”
“No, no!” Mrs. Vertrees protested. “I never said such a—”
“No, not in words; I mean what you MEANT. It's true, isn't it, that marriage really is 'not a bed of roses, but a field of battle'? To get right down to it, a girl could fight it out with anybody, couldn't she? One man as well as another?”
“Oh, my dear! I'm sure your father and I—”
“Yes, yes,” said Mary, indulgently. “I don't mean you and papa. But isn't it propinquity that makes marriages? So many people say so, there must be something in it.”
“Mary, I can't bear for you to talk like that.” And Mrs. Vertrees lifted pleading eyes to her daughter—eyes that begged to be spared. “It sounds—almost reckless!”
Mary caught the appeal, came to her, and kissed her gaily. “Never fret, dear! I'm not likely to do anything I don't want to do—I've always been too thorough-going a little pig! And if it IS propinquity that does our choosing for us, well, at least no girl in the world could ask for more than THAT! How could there be any more propinquity than the very house next door?”
She gave her mother a final kiss and went gaily all the way to the door this time, pausing for her postscript with her hand on the knob. “Oh, the one that caught me looking in the window, mamma, the youngest one—”
“Did he speak of it?” Mrs. Vertrees asked, apprehensively.
“No. He didn't speak at all, that I saw, to any one. I didn't meet him. But he isn't insane, I'm sure; or if he is, he has long intervals when he's not. Mr. James Sheridan mentioned that he lived at home when he was 'well enough'; and it may be he's only an invalid. He looks dreadfully ill, but he has pleasant eyes, and it struck me that if—if one were in the Sheridan family”—she laughed a little ruefully—“he might be interesting to talk to sometimes, when there was too much stocks and bonds. I didn't see him after dinner.”
“There must be something wrong with him,” said Mrs. Vertrees. “They'd have introduced him if there wasn't.”
“I don't know. He's been ill so much and away so much—sometimes people like that just don't seem to 'count' in a family. His father spoke of sending him back to a machine-shop of some sort; I suppose he meant when the poor thing gets better. I glanced at him just then, when Mr. Sheridan mentioned him, and he happened to be looking straight at me; and he was pathetic-looking enough before that, but the most tragic change came over him. He seemed just to die, right there at the table!”
“You mean when his father spoke of sending him to the shop place?”
“Yes.”
“Mr. Sheridan must be very unfeeling.”
“No,” said Mary, thoughtfully, “I don't think he is; but he might be uncomprehending, and certainly he's the kind of man to do anything he once sets out to do. But I wish I hadn't been looking at that poor boy just then! I'm afraid I'll keep remembering—”
“I wouldn't.” Mrs. Vertrees smiled faintly, and in her smile there was the remotest ghost of a genteel roguishness. “I'd keep my mind on pleasanter things, Mary.”
Mary laughed and nodded. “Yes, indeed! Plenty pleasant enough, and probably, if all were known, too good—even for me!”
And when she had gone Mrs. Vertrees drew a long breath, as if a burden were off her mind, and, smiling, began to undress in a gentle reverie.
CHAPTER VIII
Edith, glancing casually into the “ready-made” library, stopped abruptly, seeing Bibbs there alone. He was standing before the pearl-framed and golden-lettered poem, musingly inspecting it. He read it:
FUGITIVE
I will forget the things that sting:
The lashing look, the barbed word.
I know the very hands that fling
The stones at me had never stirred
To anger but for their own scars.
They've suffered so, that's why they strike.
I'll keep my heart among the stars
Where none shall hunt it out. Oh, like
These wounded ones I must not be,
For, wounded, I might strike in turn!
So, none shall hurt me. Far and free
Where my heart flies no one shall learn.
“Bibbs!” Edith's voice was angry, and her color deepened suddenly as she came into the room, preceded by a scent of violets much more powerful than that warranted by the actual bunch of them upon the lapel of her coat.
Bibbs did not turn his head, but wagged it solemnly, seeming depressed by the poem. “Pretty young, isn't it?” he said. “There must have been something about your looks that got the prize, Edith; I can't believe the poem did it.”
She glanced hurriedly over her shoulder and spoke sharply, but in a low voice: “I don't think it's very nice of you to bring it up at all, Bibbs. I'd like a chance to forget the whole silly business. I didn't want them to frame it, and I wish to goodness papa'd quit talking about it; but here, that night, after the dinner, didn't he go and read it aloud to the whole crowd of 'em! And then they all wanted to know what other poems I'd written and why I didn't keep it up and write some more, and if I didn't, why didn't I, and why this and why that, till I thought I'd die of shame!”
“You could tell 'em you had writer's cramp,” Bibbs suggested.
“I couldn't tell 'em anything! I just choke with mortification every time anybody speaks of the thing.”
Bibbs looked grieved. “The poem isn't THAT bad, Edith. You see, you were only seventeen when you wrote it.”
“Oh, hush up!” she snapped. “I wish it had burnt my fingers the first time I touched it. Then I might have had sense enough to leave it where it was. I had no business to take it, and I've been ashamed—”
“No, no,” he said, comfortingly. “It was the very most flattering thing ever happened to me. It was almost my last flight before I went to the machine-shop, and it's pleasant to think somebody liked it enough to—”
“But I DON'T like it!” she exclaimed. “I don't even understand it—and papa made so much fuss over its getting the prize, I just hate it! The truth is I never dreamed it'd get the prize.”
“Maybe they expected father to endow the school,” Bibbs murmured.
“Well, I had to have something to turn in, and I couldn't write a LINE! I hate poetry, anyhow; and Bobby Lamhorn's always teasing me about how I 'keep my heart among the stars.' He makes it seem such a mushy kind of thing, the way he says it. I hate it!”
“You'll have to live it down, Edith. Perhaps abroad and under another name you might find—”
“Oh, hush up! I'll hire some one to steal it and burn it the first chance I get.” She turned away petulantly, moving to the door. “I'd like to think I could hope to hear the last of it before I die!”
“Edith!” he called, as she went into the hall.
“What's the matter?”
“I want to ask you: Do I really look better, or have you just got used to me?”
“What on earth do you mean?” she said, coming back as far as the threshold.
“When I first came you couldn't look at me,” Bibbs explained, in his impersonal way. “But I've noticed you look at me lately. I wondered if I'd—”
“It's because you look so much better,” she told him, cheerfully. “This month you've been here's done you no end of good. It's the change.”
“Yes, that's what they said at the sanitarium—the change.”
“You look worse than 'most anybody I ever saw,” said Edith, with supreme candor. “But I don't know much about it. I've never seen a corpse in my life, and I've never even seen anybody that was terribly sick, so you mustn't judge by me. I only know you do look better, I'm glad to say. But you're right about my not being able to look at you at first. You had a kind of whiteness that—Well, you're almost as thin, I suppose, but you've got more just ordinarily pale; not that ghastly look. Anybody could look at you now, Bibbs, and no—not get—”
“Sick?”
“Well—almost that!” she laughed. “And you're getting a better color every day, Bibbs; you really are. You're getting along splendidly.”
“I—I'm afraid so,” he said, ruefully.
“'Afraid so'! Well, if you aren't the queerest! I suppose you mean father might send you back to the machine-shop if you get well enough. I heard him say something about it the night of the—” The jingle of a distant bell interrupted her, and she glanced at her watch. “Bobby Lamhorn! I'm going to motor him out to look at a place in the country. Afternoon, Bibbs!”
When she had gone, Bibbs mooned pessimistically from shelf to shelf, his eye wandering among the titles of the books. The library consisted almost entirely of handsome “uniform editions”: Irving, Poe, Cooper, Goldsmith, Scott, Byron, Burns, Longfellow, Tennyson, Hume, Gibbon, Prescott, Thackeray, Dickens, De Musset, Balzac, Gautier, Flaubert, Goethe, Schiller, Dante, and Tasso. There were shelves and shelves of encyclopedias, of anthologies, of “famous classics,” of “Oriental masterpieces,” of “masterpieces of oratory,” and more shelves of “selected libraries” of “literature,” of “the drama,” and of “modern science.” They made an effective decoration for the room, all these big, expensive books, with a glossy binding here and there twinkling a reflection of the flames that crackled in the splendid Gothic fireplace; but Bibbs had an impression that the bookseller who selected them considered them a relief, and that white-jacket considered them a burden of dust, and that nobody else considered them at all. Himself, he disturbed not one.
There came a chime of bells from a clock in another part of the house, and white-jacket appeared beamingly in the doorway, bearing furs. “Awready, Mist' Bibbs,” he announced. “You' ma say wrap up wawm f' you' ride, an' she cain' go with you to-day, an' not f'git go see you' pa at fo' 'clock. Aw ready, suh.”
He equipped Bibbs for the daily drive Dr. Gurney had commanded; and in the manner of a master of ceremonies unctuously led the way. In the hall they passed the Moor, and Bibbs paused before it while white-jacket opened the door with a flourish and waved condescendingly to the chauffeur in the car which stood waiting in the driveway.
“It seems to me I asked you what you thought about this 'statue' when I first came home, George,” said Bibbs, thoughtfully. “What did you tell me?”
“Yessuh!” George chuckled, perfectly understanding that for some unknown reason Bibbs enjoyed hearing him repeat his opinion of the Moor. “You ast me when you firs' come home, an' you ast me nex' day, an' mighty near ev'y day all time you been here; an' las' Sunday you ast me twicet.” He shook his head solemnly. “Look to me mus' be somep'm might lamiDAL 'bout 'at statue!”
“Mighty what?”
“Mighty lamiDAL!” George, burst out laughing. “What DO 'at word mean, Mist' Bibbs?”
“It's new to me, George. Where did you hear it?”
“I nev' DID hear it!” said George. “I uz dess sittin' thinkum to myse'f an' she pop in my head—'lamiDAL,' dess like 'at! An' she soun' so good, seem like she GOTTA mean somep'm!”
“Come to think of it, I believe she does mean something. Why, yes—”
“Do she?” cried George. “WHAT she mean?”
“It's exactly the word for the statue,” said Bibbs, with conviction, as he climbed into the car. “It's a lamiDAL statue.”
“Hiyi!” George exulted. “Man! Man! Listen! Well, suh, she mighty lamiDAL statue, but lamiDAL statue heap o' trouble to dus'!”
“I expect she is!” said Bibbs, as the engine began to churn; and a moment later he was swept from sight.
George turned to Mist' Jackson, who had been listening benevolently in the hallway. “Same he aw-ways say, Mist' Jackson—'I expec' she is!' Ev'y day he try t' git me talk 'bout 'at lamiDAL statue, an' aw-ways, las' thing HE say, 'I expec' she is!' You know, Mist' Jackson, if he git well, 'at young man go' be pride o' the family, Mist' Jackson. Yes-suh, right now I pick 'im fo' firs' money!”
“Look out with all 'at money, George!” Jackson warned the enthusiast. “White folks 'n 'is house know 'im heap longer'n you. You the on'y man bettin' on 'im!”
“I risk it!” cried George, merrily. “I put her all on now—ev'y cent! 'At boy's go' be flower o' the flock!”
This singular prophecy, founded somewhat recklessly upon gratitude for the meaning of “lamiDAL,” differed radically from another prediction concerning Bibbs, set forth for the benefit of a fair auditor some twenty minutes later.
Jim Sheridan, skirting the edges of the town with Mary Vertrees beside him, in his own swift machine, encountered the invalid upon the highroad. The two cars were going in opposite directions, and the occupants of Jim's had only a swaying glimpse of Bibbs sitting alone on the back seat—his white face startlingly white against cap and collar of black fur—but he flashed into recognition as Mary bowed to him.
Jim waved his left hand carelessly. “It's Bibbs, taking his constitutional,” he explained.
“Yes, I know,” said Mary. “I bowed to him, too, though I've never met him. In fact, I've only seen him once—no, twice. I hope he won't think I'm very bold, bowing to him.”
“I doubt if he noticed it,” said honest Jim.
“Oh, no!” she cried.
“What's the trouble?”
“I'm almost sure people notice it when I bow to them.”
“Oh, I see!” said Jim. “Of course they would ordinarily, but Bibbs is funny.”
“Is he? How?” she asked. “He strikes me as anything but funny.”
“Well, I'm his brother,” Jim said, deprecatingly, “but I don't know what he's like, and, to tell the truth, I've never felt exactly like I WAS his brother, the way I do Roscoe. Bibbs never did seem more than half alive to me. Of course Roscoe and I are older, and when we were boys we were too big to play with him, but he never played anyway, with boys his own age. He'd rather just sit in the house and mope around by himself. Nobody could ever get him to DO anything; you can't get him to do anything now. He never had any LIFE in him; and honestly, if he is my brother, I must say I believe Bibbs Sheridan is the laziest man God ever made! Father put him in the machine-shop over at the Pump Works—best thing in the world for him—and he was just plain no account. It made him sick! If he'd had the right kind of energy—the kind father's got, for instance, or Roscoe, either—why, it wouldn't have made him sick. And suppose it was either of them—yes, or me, either—do you think any of us would have stopped if we WERE sick? Not much! I hate to say it, but Bibbs Sheridan'll never amount to anything as long as he lives.”
Mary looked thoughtful. “Is there any particular reason why he should?” she asked.
“Good gracious!” he exclaimed. “You don't mean that, do you? Don't you believe in a man's knowing how to earn his salt, no matter how much money his father's got? Hasn't the business of this world got to be carried on by everybody in it? Are we going to lay back on what we've got and see other fellows get ahead of us? If we've got big things already, isn't it every man's business to go ahead and make 'em bigger? Isn't it his duty? Don't we always want to get bigger and bigger?”
“Ye-es—I don't know. But I feel rather sorry for your brother. He looked so lonely—and sick.”
“He's gettin' better every day,” Jim said. “Dr. Gurney says so. There's nothing much the matter with him, really—it's nine-tenths imaginary. 'Nerves'! People that are willing to be busy don't have nervous diseases, because they don't have time to imagine 'em.”
“You mean his trouble is really mental?”
“Oh, he's not a lunatic,” said Jim. “He's just queer. Sometimes he'll say something right bright, but half the time what he says is 'way off the subject, or else there isn't any sense to it at all. For instance, the other day I heard him talkin' to one of the darkies in the hall. The darky asked him what time he wanted the car for his drive, and anybody else in the world would have just said what time they DID want it, and that would have been all there was to it; but here's what Bibbs says, and I heard him with my own ears. 'What time do I want the car?' he says. 'Well, now, that depends—that depends,' he says. He talks slow like that, you know. 'I'll tell you what time I want the car, George,' he says, 'if you'll tell ME what you think of this statue!' That's exactly his words! Asked the darky what he thought of that Arab Edith and mother bought for the hall!”
Mary pondered upon this. “He might have been in fun, perhaps,” she suggested.
“Askin' a darky what he thought of a piece of statuary—of a work of art! Where on earth would be the fun of that? No, you're just kind-hearted—and that's the way you OUGHT to be, of course—”
“Thank you, Mr. Sheridan!” she laughed.
“See here!” he cried. “Isn't there any way for us to get over this Mister and Miss thing? A month's got thirty-one days in it; I've managed to be with you a part of pretty near all the thirty-one, and I think you know how I feel by this time—”
She looked panic-stricken immediately. “Oh, no,” she protested, quickly. “No, I don't, and—”
“Yes, you do,” he said, and his voice shook a little. “You couldn't help knowing.”
“But I do!” she denied, hurriedly. “I do help knowing. I mean—Oh, wait!”
“What for? You do know how I feel, and you—well, you've certainly WANTED me to feel that way—or else pretended—”
“Now, now!” she lamented. “You're spoiling such a cheerful afternoon!”
“'Spoilin' it!'” He slowed down the car and turned his face to her squarely. “See here, Miss Vertrees, haven't you—”
“Stop! Stop the car a minute.” And when he had complied she faced him as squarely as he evidently desired her to face him. “Listen. I don't want you to go on, to-day.”
“Why not?” he asked, sharply.
“I don't know.”
“You mean it's just a whim?”
“I don't know,” she repeated. Her voice was low and troubled and honest, and she kept her clear eyes upon his.
“Will you tell me something?”
“Almost anything.”
“Have you ever told any man you loved him?”
And at that, though she laughed, she looked a little contemptuous. “No,” she said. “And I don't think I ever shall tell any man that—or ever know what it means. I'm in earnest, Mr. Sheridan.”
“Then you—you've just been flirting with me!” Poor Jim looked both furious and crestfallen.
“Not one bit!” she cried. “Not one word! Not one syllable! I've meant every single thing!”
“I don't—”
“Of course you don't!” she said. “Now, Mr. Sheridan, I want you to start the car. Now! Thank you. Slowly, till I finish what I have to say. I have not flirted with you. I have deliberately courted you. One thing more, and then I want you to take me straight home, talking about the weather all the way. I said that I do not believe I shall ever 'care' for any man, and that is true. I doubt the existence of the kind of 'caring' we hear about in poems and plays and novels. I think it must be just a kind of emotional TALK—most of it. At all events, I don't feel it. Now, we can go faster, please.”
“Just where does that let me out?” he demanded. “How does that excuse you for—”
“It isn't an excuse,” she said, gently, and gave him one final look, wholly desolate. “I haven't said I should never marry.”
“What?” Jim gasped.
She inclined her head in a broken sort of acquiescence, very humble, unfathomably sorrowful.
“I promise nothing,” she said, faintly.
“You needn't!” shouted Jim, radiant and exultant. “You needn't! By George! I know you're square; that's enough for me! You wait and promise whenever you're ready!”
“Don't forget what I asked,” she begged him.
“Talk about the weather? I will! God bless the old weather!” cried the happy Jim.
CHAPTER IX
Through the open country Bibbs was borne flying between brown fields and sun-flecked groves of gray trees, to breathe the rushing, clean air beneath a glorious sky—that sky so despised in the city, and so maltreated there, that from early October to mid-May it was impossible for men to remember that blue is the rightful color overhead.
Upon each of Bibbs's cheeks there was a hint of something almost resembling a pinkishness; not actual color, but undeniably its phantom. How largely this apparition may have been the work of the wind upon his face it is difficult to calculate, for beyond a doubt it was partly the result of a lady's bowing to him upon no more formal introduction than the circumstance of his having caught her looking into his window a month before. She had bowed definitely; she had bowed charmingly. And it seemed to Bibbs that she must have meant to convey her forgiveness.
There had been something in her recognition of him unfamiliar to his experience, and he rode the warmer for it. Nor did he lack the impression that he would long remember her as he had just seen her: her veil tumultuously blowing back, her face glowing in the wind—and that look of gay friendliness tossed to him like a fresh rose in carnival.
By and by, upon a rising ground, the driver halted the car, then backed and tacked, and sent it forward again with its nose to the south and the smoke. Far before him Bibbs saw the great smudge upon the horizon, that nest of cloud in which the city strove and panted like an engine shrouded in its own steam. But to Bibbs, who had now to go to the very heart of it, for a commanded interview with his father, the distant cloud was like an implacable genius issuing thunderously in smoke from his enchanted bottle, and irresistibly drawing Bibbs nearer and nearer.
They passed from the farm lands, and came, in the amber light of November late afternoon, to the farthermost outskirts of the city; and here the sky shimmered upon the verge of change from blue to gray; the smoke did not visibly permeate the air, but it was there, nevertheless—impalpable, thin, no more than the dust of smoke. And then, as the car drove on, the chimneys and stacks of factories came swimming up into view like miles of steamers advancing abreast, every funnel with its vast plume, savage and black, sweeping to the horizon, dripping wealth and dirt and suffocation over league on league already rich and vile with grime.
The sky had become only a dingy thickening of the soiled air; and a roar and clangor of metals beat deafeningly on Bibbs's ears. And now the car passed two great blocks of long brick buildings, hideous in all ways possible to make them hideous; doorways showing dark one moment and lurid the next with the leap of some virulent interior flame, revealing blackened giants, half naked, in passionate action, struggling with formless things in the hot illumination. And big as these shops were, they were growing bigger, spreading over a third block, where two new structures were mushrooming to completion in some hasty cement process of a stability not over-reassuring. Bibbs pulled the rug closer about him, and not even the phantom of color was left upon his cheeks as he passed this place, for he knew it too well. Across the face of one of the buildings there was an enormous sign: “Sheridan Automatic Pump Co., Inc.”
Thence they went through streets of wooden houses, all grimed, and adding their own grime from many a sooty chimney; flimsey wooden houses of a thousand flimsy whimsies in the fashioning, built on narrow lots and nudging one another crossly, shutting out the stingy sunlight from one another; bad neighbors who would destroy one another root and branch some night when the right wind blew. They were only waiting for that wind and a cigarette, and then they would all be gone together—a pinch of incense burned upon the tripod of the god.
Along these streets there were skinny shade-trees, and here and there a forest elm or walnut had been left; but these were dying. Some people said it was the scale; some said it was the smoke; and some were sure that asphalt and “improving” the streets did it; but Bigness was in too Big a hurry to bother much about trees. He had telegraph-poles and telephone-poles and electric-light-poles and trolley-poles by the thousand to take their places. So he let the trees die and put up his poles. They were hideous, but nobody minded that; and sometimes the wires fell and killed people—but not often enough to matter at all.
Thence onward the car bore Bibbs through the older parts of the town where the few solid old houses not already demolished were in transition: some, with their fronts torn away, were being made into segments of apartment-buildings; others had gone uproariously into trade, brazenly putting forth “show-windows” on their first floors, seeming to mean it for a joke; one or two with unaltered facades peeped humorously over the tops of temporary office buildings of one story erected in the old front yards. Altogether, the town here was like a boarding-house hash the Sunday after Thanksgiving; the old ingredients were discernible.
This was the fringe of Bigness's own sanctuary, and now Bibbs reached the roaring holy of holies itself. The car must stop at every crossing while the dark-garbed crowds, enveloped in maelstroms of dust, hurried before it. Magnificent new buildings, already dingy, loomed hundreds of feet above him; newer ones, more magnificent, were rising beside them, rising higher; old buildings were coming down; middle-aged buildings were coming down; the streets were laid open to their entrails and men worked underground between palisades, and overhead in metal cobwebs like spiders in the sky. Trolley-cars and long interurban cars, built to split the wind like torpedo-boats, clanged and shrieked their way round swarming corners; motor-cars of every kind and shape known to man babbled frightful warnings and frantic demands; hospital ambulances clamored wildly for passage; steam-whistles signaled the swinging of titanic tentacle and claw; riveters rattled like machine-guns; the ground shook to the thunder of gigantic trucks; and the conglomerate sound of it all was the sound of earthquake playing accompaniments for battle and sudden death. On one of the new steel buildings no work was being done that afternoon. The building had killed a man in the morning—and the steel-workers always stop for the day when that “happens.”
And in the hurrying crowds, swirling and sifting through the brobdingnagian camp of iron and steel, one saw the camp-followers and the pagan women—there would be work to-day and dancing to-night. For the Puritan's dry voice is but the crackling of a leaf underfoot in the rush and roar of the coming of the new Egypt.
Bibbs was on time. He knew it must be “to the minute” or his father would consider it an outrage; and the big chronometer in Sheridan's office marked four precisely when Bibbs walked in. Coincidentally with his entrance five people who had been at work in the office, under Sheridan's direction, walked out. They departed upon no visible or audible suggestion, and with a promptness that seemed ominous to the new-comer. As the massive door clicked softly behind the elderly stenographer, the last of the procession, Bibbs had a feeling that they all understood that he was a failure as a great man's son, a disappointment, the “queer one” of the family, and that he had been summoned to judgment—a well-founded impression, for that was exactly what they understood.
“Sit down,” said Sheridan.
It is frequently an advantage for deans, school-masters, and worried fathers to place delinquents in the sitting-posture. Bibbs sat.
Sheridan, standing, gazed enigmatically upon his son for a period of silence, then walked slowly to a window and stood looking out of it, his big hands, loosely hooked together by the thumbs, behind his back. They were soiled, as were all other hands down-town, except such as might be still damp from a basin.
“Well, Bibbs,” he said at last, not altering his attitude, “do you know what I'm goin' to do with you?”
Bibbs, leaning back in his chair, fixed his eyes contemplatively upon the ceiling. “I heard you tell Jim,” he began, in his slow way. “You said you'd send him to the machine-shop with me if he didn't propose to Miss Vertrees. So I suppose that must be your plan for me. But—”
“But what?” said Sheridan, irritably, as the son paused.
“Isn't there somebody you'd let ME propose to?”
That brought his father sharply round to face him. “You beat the devil! Bibbs, what IS the matter with you? Why can't you be like anybody else?”
“Liver, maybe,” said Bibbs, gently.
“Boh! Even ole Doc Gurney says there's nothin' wrong with you organically. No. You're a dreamer, Bibbs; that's what's the matter, and that's ALL the matter. Oh, not one o' these BIG dreamers that put through the big deals! No, sir! You're the kind o' dreamer that just sets out on the back fence and thinks about how much trouble there must be in the world! That ain't the kind that builds the bridges, Bibbs; it's the kind that borrows fifteen cents from his wife's uncle's brother-in-law to get ten cent's worth o' plug tobacco and a nickel's worth o' quinine!”
He put the finishing touch on this etching with a snort, and turned again to the window.
“Look out there!” he bade his son. “Look out o' that window! Look at the life and energy down there! I should think ANY young man's blood would tingle to get into it and be part of it. Look at the big things young men are doin' in this town!” He swung about, coming to the mahogany desk in the middle of the room. “Look at what I was doin' at your age! Look at what your own brothers are doin'! Look at Roscoe! Yes, and look at Jim! I made Jim president o' the Sheridan Realty Company last New-Year's, with charge of every inch o' ground and every brick and every shingle and stick o' wood we own; and it's an example to any young man—or ole man, either—the way he took ahold of it. Last July we found out we wanted two more big warehouses at the Pump Works—wanted 'em quick. Contractors said it couldn't be done; said nine or ten months at the soonest; couldn't see it any other way. What'd Jim do? Took the contract himself; found a fellow with a new cement and concrete process; kept men on the job night and day, and stayed on it night and day himself—and, by George! we begin to USE them warehouses next week! Four months and a half, and every inch fireproof! I tell you Jim's one o' these fellers that make miracles happen! Now, I don't say every young man can be like Jim, because there's mighty few got his ability, but every young man can go in and do his share. This town is God's own country, and there's opportunity for anybody with a pound of energy and an ounce o' gumption. I tell you these young business men I watch just do my heart good! THEY don't set around on the back fence—no, sir! They take enough exercise to keep their health; and they go to a baseball game once or twice a week in summer, maybe, and they're raisin' nice families, with sons to take their places sometime and carry on the work—because the work's got to go ON! They're puttin' their life-blood into it, I tell you, and that's why we're gettin' bigger every minute, and why THEY'RE gettin' bigger, and why it's all goin' to keep ON gettin' bigger!”
He slapped the desk resoundingly with his open palm, and then, observing that Bibbs remained in the same impassive attitude, with his eyes still fixed upon the ceiling in a contemplation somewhat plaintive, Sheridan was impelled to groan. “Oh, Lord!” he said. “This is the way you always were. I don't believe you understood a darn word I been sayin'! You don't LOOK as if you did. By George! it's discouraging!”
“I don't understand about getting—about getting bigger,” said Bibbs, bringing his gaze down to look at his father placatively. “I don't see just why—”
“WHAT?” Sheridan leaned forward, resting his hands upon the desk and staring across it incredulously at his son.
“I don't understand—exactly—what you want it all bigger for?”
“Great God!” shouted Sheridan, and struck the desk a blow with his clenched fist. “A son of mine asks me that! You go out and ask the poorest day-laborer you can find! Ask him that question—”
“I did once,” Bibbs interrupted; “when I was in the machine-shop. I—”
“Wha'd he say?”
“He said, 'Oh, hell!'” answered Bibbs, mildly.
“Yes, I reckon he would!” Sheridan swung away from the desk. “I reckon he certainly would! And I got plenty sympathy with him right now, myself!”
“It's the same answer, then?” Bibbs's voice was serious, almost tremulous.
“Damnation!” Sheridan roared. “Did you ever hear the word Prosperity, you ninny? Did you ever hear the word Ambition? Did you ever hear the word PROGRESS?”
He flung himself into a chair after the outburst, his big chest surging, his throat tumultuous with gutteral incoherences. “Now then,” he said, huskily, when the anguish had somewhat abated, “what do you want to do?”
“Sir?”
“What do you WANT to do, I said.”
Taken by surprise, Bibbs stammered. “What—what do—I—what—”
“If I'd let you do exactly what you had the whim for, what would you do?”
Bibbs looked startled; then timidity overwhelmed him—a profound shyness. He bent his head and fixed his lowered eyes upon the toe of his shoe, which he moved to and fro upon the rug, like a culprit called to the desk in school.
“What would you do? Loaf?”
“No, sir.” Bibbs's voice was almost inaudible, and what little sound it made was unquestionably a guilty sound. “I suppose I'd—I'd—”
“Well?”
“I suppose I'd try to—to write.”
“Write what?”
“Nothing important—just poems and essays, perhaps.”
“That all?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I see,” said his father, breathing quickly with the restraint he was putting upon himself. “That is, you want to write, but you don't want to write anything of any account.”
“You think—”
Sheridan got up again. “I take my hat off to the man that can write a good ad,” he said, emphatically. “The best writin' talent in this country is right spang in the ad business to-day. You buy a magazine for good writin'—look on the back of it! Let me tell you I pay money for that kind o' writin'. Maybe you think it's easy. Just try it! I've tried it, and I can't do it. I tell you an ad's got to be written so it makes people do the hardest thing in this world to GET 'em to do: it's got to make 'em give up their MONEY! You talk about 'poems and essays.' I tell you when it comes to the actual skill o' puttin' words together so as to make things HAPPEN, R. T. Bloss, right here in this city, knows more in a minute than George Waldo Emerson ever knew in his whole life!”
“You—you may be—” Bibbs said, indistinctly, the last word smothered in a cough.
“Of COURSE I'm right! And if it ain't just like you to want to take up with the most out-o'-date kind o' writin' there is! 'Poems and essays'! My Lord, Bibbs, that's WOMEN'S work! You can't pick up a newspaper without havin' to see where Mrs. Rumskididle read a paper on 'Jane Eyre,' or 'East Lynne,' at the God-Knows-What Club. And 'poetry'! Why, look at Edith! I expect that poem o' hers would set a pretty high-water mark for you, young man, and it's the only one she's ever managed to write in her whole LIFE! When I wanted her to go on and write some more she said it took too much time. Said it took months and months. And Edith's a smart girl; she's got more energy in her little finger than you ever give me a chance to see in your whole body, Bibbs. Now look at the facts: say she could turn out four or five poems a year and you could turn out maybe two. That medal she got was worth about fifteen dollars, so there's your income—thirty dollars a year! That's a fine success to make of your life! I'm not sayin' a word against poetry. I wouldn't take ten thousand dollars right now for that poem of Edith's; and poetry's all right enough in its place—but you leave it to the girls. A man's got to do a man's work in this world!”
He seated himself in a chair at his son's side and, leaning over, tapped Bibbs confidentially on the knee. “This city's got the greatest future in America, and if my sons behave right by me and by themselves they're goin' to have a mighty fair share of it—a mighty fair share. I love this town. It's God's own footstool, and it's made money for me every day right along, I don't know how many years. I love it like I do my own business, and I'd fight for it as quick as I'd fight for my own family. It's a beautiful town. Look at our wholesale district; look at any district you want to; look at the park system we're puttin' through, and the boulevards and the public statuary. And she grows. God! how she grows!” He had become intensely grave; he spoke with solemnity. “Now, Bibbs, I can't take any of it—nor any gold or silver nor buildings nor bonds—away with me in my shroud when I have to go. But I want to leave my share in it to my boys. I've worked for it; I've been a builder and a maker; and two blades of grass have grown where one grew before, whenever I laid my hand on the ground and willed 'em to grow. I've built big, and I want the buildin' to go on. And when my last hour comes I want to know that my boys are ready to take charge; that they're fit to take charge and go ON with it. Bibbs, when that hour comes I want to know that my boys are big men, ready and fit to take hold of big things. Bibbs, when I'm up above I want to know that the big share I've made mine, here below, is growin' bigger and bigger in the charge of my boys.”
He leaned back, deeply moved. “There!” he said, huskily. “I've never spoken more what was in my heart in my life. I do it because I want you to understand—and not think me a mean father. I never had to talk that way to Jim and Roscoe. They understood without any talk, Bibbs.”
“I see,” said Bibbs. “At least I think I do. But—”
“Wait a minute!” Sheridan raised his hand. “If you see the least bit in the world, then you understand how it feels to me to have my son set here and talk about 'poems and essays' and such-like fooleries. And you must understand, too, what it meant to start one o' my boys and have him come back on me the way you did, and have to be sent to a sanitarium because he couldn't stand work. Now, let's get right down to it, Bibbs. I've had a whole lot o' talk with ole Doc Gurney about you, one time another, and I reckon I understand your case just about as well as he does, anyway! Now here, I'll be frank with you. I started you in harder than what I did the other boys, and that was for your own good, because I saw you needed to be shook up more'n they did. You were always kind of moody and mopish—and you needed work that'd keep you on the jump. Now, why did it make you sick instead of brace you up and make a man of you the way it ought of done? I pinned ole Gurney down to it. I says, 'Look here, ain't it really because he just plain hated it?' 'Yes,' he says, 'that's it. If he'd enjoyed it, it wouldn't 'a' hurt him. He loathes it, and that affects his nervous system. The more he tries it, the more he hates it; and the more he hates it, the more injury it does him.' That ain't quite his words, but it's what he meant. And that's about the way it is.”
“Yes,” said Bibbs, “that's about the way it is.”
“Well, then, I reckon it's up to me not only to make you do it, but to make you like it!”
Bibbs shivered. And he turned upon his father a look that was almost ghostly. “I can't,” he said, in a low voice. “I can't.”
“Can't go back to the shop?”
“No. Can't like it. I can't.”
Sheridan jumped up, his patience gone. To his own view, he had reasoned exhaustively, had explained fully and had pleaded more than a father should, only to be met in the end with the unreasoning and mysterious stubbornness which had been Bibbs's baffling characteristic from childhood. “By George, you will!” he cried. “You'll go back there and you'll like it! Gurney says it won't hurt you if you like it, and he says it'll kill you if you go back and hate it; so it looks as if it was about up to you not to hate it. Well, Gurney's a fool! Hatin' work doesn't kill anybody; and this isn't goin' to kill you, whether you hate it or not. I've never made a mistake in a serious matter in my life, and it wasn't a mistake my sendin' you there in the first place. And I'm goin' to prove it—I'm goin' to send you back there and vindicate my judgment. Gurney says it's all 'mental attitude.' Well, you're goin' to learn the right one! He says in a couple more months this fool thing that's been the matter with you'll be disappeared completely and you'll be back in as good or better condition than you were before you ever went into the shop. And right then is when you begin over—right in that same shop! Nobody can call me a hard man or a mean father. I do the best I can for my chuldern, and I take full responsibility for bringin' my sons up to be men. Now, so far, I've failed with you. But I'm not goin' to keep ON failin'. I never tackled a job YET I didn't put through, and I'm not goin' to begin with my own son. I'm goin' to make a MAN of you. By God! I am!”
Bibbs rose and went slowly to the door, where he turned. “You say you give me a couple of months?” he said.
Sheridan pushed a bell-button on his desk. “Gurney said two months more would put you back where you were. You go home and begin to get yourself in the right 'mental attitude' before those two months are up! Good-by!”
“Good-by, sir,” said Bibbs, meekly.
CHAPTER X
Bibbs's room, that neat apartment for transients to which the “lamidal” George had shown him upon his return, still bore the appearance of temporary quarters, possibly because Bibbs had no clear conception of himself as a permanent incumbent. However, he had set upon the mantelpiece the two photographs that he owned: one, a “group” twenty years old—his father and mother, with Jim and Roscoe as boys—and the other a “cabinet” of Edith at sixteen. And upon a table were the books he had taken from his trunk: Sartor Resartus, Virginibus Puerisque, Huckleberry Finn, and Afterwhiles. There were some other books in the trunk—a large one, which remained unremoved at the foot of the bed, adding to the general impression of transiency. It contained nearly all the possessions as well as the secret life of Bibbs Sheridan, and Bibbs sat beside it, the day after his interview with his father, raking over a small collection of manuscripts in the top tray. Some of these he glanced through dubiously, finding little comfort in them; but one made him smile. Then he shook his head ruefully indeed, and ruefully began to read it. It was written on paper stamped “Hood Sanitarium,” and bore the title, “Leisure.”
A man may keep a quiet heart at seventy miles an hour, but not if he is running the train. Nor is the habit of contemplation a useful quality in the stoker of a foundry furnace; it will not be found to recommend him to the approbation of his superiors. For a profession adapted solely to the pursuit of happiness in thinking, I would choose that of an invalid: his money is time and he may spend it on Olympus. It will not suffice to be an amateur invalid. To my way of thinking, the perfect practitioner must be to all outward purposes already dead if he is to begin the perfect enjoyment of life. His serenity must not be disturbed by rumors of recovery; he must lie serene in his long chair in the sunshine. The world must be on the other side of the wall, and the wall must be so thick and so high that he cannot hear the roaring of the furnace fires and the screaming of the whistles. Peace—
Having read so far as the word “peace,” Bibbs suffered an interruption interesting as a coincidence of contrast. High voices sounded in the hall just outside his door; and it became evident that a woman's quarrel was in progress, the parties to it having begun it in Edith's room, and continuing it vehemently as they came out into the hall.
“Yes, you BETTER go home!” Bibbs heard his sister vociferating, shrilly. “You better go home and keep your mind a little more on your HUSBAND!”
“Edie, Edie!” he heard his mother remonstrating, as peacemaker.
“You see here!” This was Sibyl, and her voice was both acrid and tremulous. “Don't you talk to me that way! I came here to tell Mother Sheridan what I'd heard, and to let her tell Father Sheridan if she thought she ought to, and I did it for your own good.”
“Yes, you did!” And Edith's gibing laughter tooted loudly. “Yes, you did! YOU didn't have any other reason! OH no! YOU don't want to break it up between Bobby Lamhorn and me because—”
“Edie, Edie! Now, now!”
“Oh, hush up, mamma! I'd like to know, then, if she says her new friends tell her he's got such a reputation that he oughtn't to come here, what about his not going to HER house. How—”
“I've explained that to Mother Sheridan.” Sibyl's voice indicated that she was descending the stairs. “Married people are not the same. Some things that should be shielded from a young girl—”
This seemed to have no very soothing effect upon Edith. “'Shielded from a young girl'!” she shrilled. “You seem pretty willing to be the shield! You look out Roscoe doesn't notice what kind of a shield you are!”
Sibyl's answer was inaudible, but Mrs. Sheridan's flurried attempts at pacification were renewed. “Now, Edie, Edie, she means it for your good, and you'd oughtn't to—”
“Oh, hush up, mamma, and let me alone! If you dare tell papa—”
“Now, now! I'm not going to tell him to-day, and maybe—”
“You've got to promise NEVER to tell him!” the girl cried, passionately.
“Well, we'll see. You just come back in your own room, and we'll—”
“No! I WON'T 'talk it over'! Stop pulling me! Let me ALONE!” And Edith, flinging herself violently upon Bibbs's door, jerked it open, swung round it into the room, slammed the door behind her, and threw herself, face down, upon the bed in such a riot of emotion that she had no perception of Bibbs's presence in the room. Gasping and sobbing in a passion of tears, she beat the coverlet and pillows with her clenched fists. “Sneak!” she babbled aloud. “Sneak! Snake-in-the-grass! Cat!”
Bibbs saw that she did not know he was there, and he went softly toward the door, hoping to get away before she became aware of him; but some sound of his movement reached her, and she sat up, startled, facing him.
“Bibbs! I thought I saw you go out awhile ago.”
“Yes. I came back, though. I'm sorry—”
“Did you hear me quarreling with Sibyl?”
“Only what you said in the hall. You lie down again, Edith. I'm going out.”
“No; don't go.” She applied a handkerchief to her eyes, emitted a sob, and repeated her request. “Don't go. I don't mind you; you're quiet, anyhow. Mamma's so fussy, and never gets anywhere. I don't mind you at all, but I wish you'd sit down.”
“All right.” And he returned to his chair beside the trunk. “Go ahead and cry all you want, Edith,” he said. “No harm in that!”
“Sibyl told mamma—OH!” she began, choking. “Mary Vertrees had mamma and Sibyl and I to tea, one afternoon two weeks or so ago, and she had some women there that Sibyl's been crazy to get in with, and she just laid herself out to make a hit with 'em, and she's been running after 'em ever since, and now she comes over here and says THEY say Bobby Lamhorn is so bad that, even though they like his family, none of the nice people in town would let him in their houses. In the first place, it's a falsehood, and I don't believe a word of it; and in the second place I know the reason she did it, and, what's more, she KNOWS I know it! I won't SAY what it is—not yet—because papa and all of you would think I'm as crazy as she is snaky; and Roscoe's such a fool he'd probably quit speaking to me. But it's true! Just you watch her; that's all I ask. Just you watch that woman. You'll see!”
As it happened, Bibbs was literally watching “that woman.” Glancing from the window, he saw Sibyl pause upon the pavement in front of the old house next door. She stood a moment, in deep thought, then walked quickly up the path to the door, undoubtedly with the intention of calling. But he did not mention this to his sister, who, after delivering herself of a rather vague jeremiad upon the subject of her sister-in-law's treacheries, departed to her own chamber, leaving him to his speculations. The chief of these concerned the social elasticities of women. Sibyl had just been a participant in a violent scene; she had suffered hot insult of a kind that could not fail to set her quivering with resentment; and yet she elected to betake herself to the presence of people whom she knew no more than “formally.” Bibbs marveled. Surely, he reflected, some traces of emotion must linger upon Sibyl's face or in her manner; she could not have ironed it all quite out in the three or four minutes it took her to reach the Vertreeses' door.
And in this he was not mistaken, for Mary Vertrees was at that moment wondering what internal excitement Mrs. Roscoe Sheridan was striving to master. But Sibyl had no idea that she was allowing herself to exhibit anything except the gaiety which she conceived proper to the manner of a casual caller. She was wholly intent upon fulfilling the sudden purpose that brought her, and she was no more self-conscious than she was finely intelligent. For Sibyl Sheridan belonged to a type Scriptural in its antiquity. She was merely the idle and half-educated intriguer who may and does delude men, of course, and the best and dullest of her own sex as well, finding invariably strong supporters among these latter. It is a type that has wrought some damage in the world and would have wrought greater, save for the check put upon its power by intelligent women and by its own “lack of perspective,” for it is a type that never sees itself. Sibyl followed her impulses with no reflection or question—it was like a hound on the gallop after a master on horseback. She had not even the instinct to stop and consider her effect. If she wished to make a certain impression she believed that she made it. She believed that she was believed.
“My mother asked me to say that she was sorry she couldn't come down,” Mary said, when they were seated.
Sibyl ran the scale of a cooing simulance of laughter, which she had been brought up to consider the polite thing to do after a remark addressed to her by any person with whom she was not on familiar terms. It was intended partly as a courtesy and partly as the foundation for an impression of sweetness.
“Just thought I'd fly in a minute,” she said, continuing the cooing to relieve the last doubt of her gentiality. “I thought I'd just behave like REAL country neighbors. We are almost out in the country, so far from down-town, aren't we? And it seemed such a LOVELY day! I wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed meeting those nice people at tea that afternoon. You see, coming here a bride and never having lived here before, I've had to depend on my husband's friends almost entirely, and I really've known scarcely anybody. Mr. Sheridan has been so engrossed in business ever since he was a mere boy, why, of course—”
She paused, with the air of having completed an explanation.
“Of course,” said Mary, sympathetically accepting it.
“Yes. I've been seeing quite a lot of the Kittersbys since that afternoon,” Sibyl went on. “They're really delightful people. Indeed they are! Yes—”
She stopped with unconscious abruptness, her mind plainly wandering to another matter; and Mary perceived that she had come upon a definite errand. Moreover, a tensing of Sibyl's eyelids, in that moment of abstraction as she looked aside from her hostess, indicated that the errand was a serious one for the caller and easily to be connected with the slight but perceptible agitation underlying her assumption of cheerful ease. There was a restlessness of breathing, a restlessness of hands.
“Mrs. Kittersby and her daughter were chatting about some of the people here in town the other day,” said Sibyl, repeating the cooing and protracting it. “They said something that took ME by surprise! We were talking about our mutual friend, Mr. Robert Lamhorn—”
Mary interrupted her promptly. “Do you mean 'mutual' to include my mother and me?” she asked.
“Why, yes; the Kittersbys and you and all of us Sheridans, I mean.”
“No,” said Mary. “We shouldn't consider Mr. Robert Lamhorn a friend of ours.”
To her surprise, Sibyl nodded eagerly, as if greatly pleased. “That's just the way Mrs. Kittersby talked!” she cried, with a vehemence that made Mary stare. “Yes, and I hear that's the way ALL you old families here speak of him!”
Mary looked aside, but otherwise she was able to maintain her composure. “I had the impression he was a friend of yours,” she said; adding, hastily, “and your husband's.”
“Oh yes,” said the caller, absently. “He is, certainly. A man's reputation for a little gaiety oughtn't to make a great difference to married people, of course. It's where young girls are in question. THEN it may be very, very dangerous. There are a great many things safe and proper for married people that might be awf'ly imprudent for a young girl. Don't you agree, Miss Vertrees?”
“I don't know,” returned the frank Mary. “Do you mean that you intend to remain a friend of Mr. Lamhorn's, but disapprove of Miss Sheridan's doing so?”
“That's it exactly!” was the naive and ardent response of Sibyl. “What I feel about it is that a man with his reputation isn't at all suitable for Edith, and the family ought to be made to understand it. I tell you,” she cried, with a sudden access of vehemence, “her father ought to put his foot down!”
Her eyes flashed with a green spark; something seemed to leap out and then retreat, but not before Mary had caught a glimpse of it, as one might catch a glimpse of a thing darting forth and then scuttling back into hiding under a bush.
“Of course,” said Sibyl, much more composedly, “I hardly need say that it's entirely on Edith's account that I'm worried about this. I'm as fond of Edith as if she was really my sister, and I can't help fretting about it. It would break my heart to have Edith's life spoiled.”
This tune was off the key, to Mary's ear. Sibyl tried to sing with pathos, but she flatted.
And when a lady receives a call from another who suffers under the stress of some feeling which she wishes to conceal, there is not uncommonly developed a phenomenon of duality comparable to the effect obtained by placing two mirrors opposite each other, one clear and the other flawed. In this case, particularly, Sibyl had an imperfect consciousness of Mary. The Mary Vertrees that she saw was merely something to be cozened to her own frantic purpose—a Mary Vertrees who was incapable of penetrating that purpose. Sibyl sat there believing that she was projecting the image of herself that she desired to project, never dreaming that with every word, every look, and every gesture she was more and more fully disclosing the pitiable truth to the clear eyes of Mary. And the Sibyl that Mary saw was an overdressed woman, in manner half rustic, and in mind as shallow as a pan, but possessed by emotions that appeared to be strong—perhaps even violent. What those emotions were Mary had not guessed, but she began to suspect.
“And Edith's life WOULD be spoiled,” Sibyl continued. “It would be a dreadful thing for the whole family. She's the very apple of Father Sheridan's eye, and he's as proud of her as he is of Jim and Roscoe. It would be a horrible thing for him to have her marry a man like Robert Lamhorn; but he doesn't KNOW anything about him, and if somebody doesn't tell him, what I'm most afraid of is that Edith might get his consent and hurry on the wedding before he finds out, and then it would be too late. You see, Miss Vertrees, it's very difficult for me to decide just what it's my duty to do.”
“I see,” said Mary, looking at her thoughtfully, “Does Miss Sheridan seem to—to care very much about him?”
“He's deliberately fascinated her,” returned the visitor, beginning to breathe quickly and heavily. “Oh, she wasn't difficult! She knew she wasn't in right in this town, and she was crazy to meet the people that were, and she thought he was one of 'em. But that was only the start that made it easy for him—and he didn't need it. He could have done it, anyway!” Sibyl was launched now; her eyes were furious and her voice shook. “He went after her deliberately, the way he does everything; he's as cold-blooded as a fish. All he cares about is his own pleasure, and lately he's decided it would be pleasant to get hold of a piece of real money—and there was Edith! And he'll marry her! Nothing on earth can stop him unless he finds out she won't HAVE any money if she marries him, and the only person that could make him understand that is Father Sheridan. Somehow, that's got to be managed, because Lamhorn is going to hurry it on as fast as he can. He told me so last night. He said he was going to marry her the first minute he could persuade her to it—and little Edith's all ready to be persuaded!” Sibyl's eyes flashed green again. “And he swore he'd do it,” she panted. “He swore he'd marry Edith Sheridan, and nothing on earth could stop him!”
And then Mary understood. Her lips parted and she stared at the babbling creature incredulously, a sudden vivid picture in her mind, a canvas of unconscious Sibyl's painting. Mary beheld it with pity and horror: she saw Sibyl clinging to Robert Lamhorn, raging, in a whisper, perhaps—for Roscoe might have been in the house, or servants might have heard. She saw Sibyl entreating, beseeching, threatening despairingly, and Lamhorn—tired of her—first evasive, then brutally letting her have the truth; and at last, infuriated, “swearing” to marry her rival. If Sibyl had not babbled out the word “swore” it might have been less plain.
The poor woman blundered on, wholly unaware of what she had confessed. “You see,” she said, more quietly, “whatever's going to be done ought to be done right away. I went over and told Mother Sheridan what I'd heard about Lamhorn—oh, I was open and aboveboard! I told her right before Edith. I think it ought all to be done with perfect frankness, because nobody can say it isn't for the girl's own good and what her best friend would do. But Mother Sheridan's under Edith's thumb, and she's afraid to ever come right out with anything. Father Sheridan's different. Edith can get anything she wants out of him in the way of money or ordinary indulgence, but when it comes to a matter like this he'd be a steel rock. If it's a question of his will against anybody else's he'd make his will rule if it killed 'em both! Now, he'd never in the world let Lamhorn come near the house again if he knew his reputation. So, you see, somebody's got to tell him. It isn't a very easy position for me, is it, Miss Vertrees?”
“No,” said Mary, gravely.
“Well, to be frank,” said Sibyl, smiling, “that's why I've come to you.”
“To ME!” Mary frowned.
Sibyl rippled and cooed again. “There isn't ANYBODY ever made such a hit with Father Sheridan in his life as you have. And of course we ALL hope you're not going to be exactly an outsider in the affairs of the family!” (This sally with another and louder effect of laughter). “And if it's MY duty, why, in a way, I think it might be thought yours, too.”
“No, no!” exclaimed Mary, sharply.
“Listen,” said Sibyl. “Now suppose I go to Father Sheridan with this story, and Edith says it's not true; suppose she says Lamhorn has a good reputation and that I'm repeating irresponsible gossip, or suppose (what's most likely) she loses her temper and says I invented it, then what am I going to do? Father Sheridan doesn't know Mrs. Kittersby and her daughter, and they're out of the question, anyway. But suppose I could say: 'All right, if you want proof, ask Miss Vertrees. She came with me, and she's waiting in the next room right now, to—”
“No, no,” said Mary, quickly. “You mustn't—”
“Listen just a minute more,” Sibyl urged, confidingly. She was on easy ground now, to her own mind, and had no doubt of her success. “You naturally don't want to begin by taking part in a family quarrel, but if YOU take part in it, it won't be one. You don't know yourself what weight you carry over there, and no one would have the right to say you did it except out of the purest kindness. Don't you see that Jim and his father would admire you all the more for it? Miss Vertrees, listen! Don't you see we OUGHT to do it, you and I? Do you suppose Robert Lamhorn cares a snap of his finger for her? Do you suppose a man like him would LOOK at Edith Sheridan if it wasn't for the money?” And again Sibyl's emotion rose to the surface. “I tell you he's after nothing on earth but to get his finger in that old man's money-pile, over there, next door! He'd marry ANYBODY to do it. Marry Edith?” she cried. “I tell you he'd marry their nigger cook for THAT!”
She stopped, afraid—at the wrong time—that she had been too vehement, but a glance at Mary reassured her, and Sibyl decided that she had produced the effect she wished. Mary was not looking at her; she was staring straight before her at the wall, her eyes wide and shining. She became visibly a little paler as Sibyl looked at her.
“After nothing on earth but to get his finger in that old man's money-pile, over there, next door!” The voice was vulgar, the words were vulgar—and the plain truth was vulgar! How it rang in Mary Vertrees's ears! The clear mirror had caught its own image clearly in the flawed one at last.
Sibyl put forth her best bid to clench the matter. She offered her bargain. “Now don't you worry,” she said, sunnily, “about this setting Edith against you. She'll get over it after a while, anyway, but if she tried to be spiteful and make it uncomfortable for you when you drop in over there, or managed so as to sort of leave you out, why, I've got a house, and Jim likes to come there. I don't THINK Edith WOULD be that way; she's too crazy to have you take her around with the smart crowd, but if she DID, you needn't worry. And another thing—I guess you won't mind Jim's own sister-in-law speaking of it. Of course, I don't know just how matters stand between you and Jim, but Jim and Roscoe are about as much alike as two brothers can be, and Roscoe was very slow making up his mind; sometimes I used to think he actually never WOULD. Now, what I mean is, sisters-in-law can do lots of things to help matters on like that. There's lots of little things can be said, and lots—”
She stopped, puzzled. Mary Vertrees had gone from pale to scarlet, and now, still scarlet indeed, she rose, without a word of explanation, or any other kind of word, and walked slowly to the open door and out of the room.
Sibyl was a little taken aback. She supposed Mary had remembered something neglected and necessary for the instruction of a servant, and that she would return in a moment; but it was rather a rude excess of absent-mindedness not to have excused herself, especially as her guest was talking. And, Mary's return being delayed, Sibyl found time to think this unprefaced exit odder and ruder than she had first considered it. There might have been more excuse for it, she thought, had she been speaking of matters less important—offering to do the girl all the kindness in her power, too!
Sibyl yawned and swung her muff impatiently; she examined the sole of her shoe; she decided on a new shape of heel; she made an inventory of the furniture of the room, of the rugs, of the wall-paper and engravings. Then she looked at her watch and frowned; went to a window and stood looking out upon the brown lawn, then came back to the chair she had abandoned, and sat again. There was no sound in the house.
A strange expression began imperceptibly to alter the planes of her face, and slowly she grew as scarlet as Mary—scarlet to the ears. She looked at her watch again—and twenty-five minutes had elapsed since she had looked at it before.
She went into the hall, glanced over her shoulder oddly; then she let herself softly out of the front door, and went across the street to her own house.
Roscoe met her upon the threshold, gloomily. “Saw you from the window,” he explained. “You must find a lot to say to that old lady.”
“What old lady?”
“Mrs. Vertrees. I been waiting for you a long time, and I saw the daughter come out, fifteen minutes ago, and post a letter, and then walk on up the street. Don't stand out on the porch,” he said, crossly. “Come in here. There's something it's come time I'll have to talk to you about. Come in!”
But as she was moving to obey he glanced across at his father's house and started. He lifted his hand to shield his eyes from the setting sun, staring fixedly. “Something's the matter over there,” he muttered, and then, more loudly, as alarm came into his voice, he said, “What's the matter over there?”
Bibbs dashed out of the gate in an automobile set at its highest speed, and as he saw Roscoe he made a gesture singularly eloquent of calamity, and was lost at once in a cloud of dust down the street. Edith had followed part of the way down the drive, and it could be seen that she was crying bitterly. She lifted both arms to Roscoe, summoning him.
“By George!” gasped Roscoe. “I believe somebody's dead!”
And he started for the New House at a run.
CHAPTER XI
Sheridan had decided to conclude his day's work early that afternoon, and at about two o'clock he left his office with a man of affairs from foreign parts, who had traveled far for a business conference with Sheridan and his colleagues. Herr Favre, in spite of his French name, was a gentleman of Bavaria. It was his first visit to our country, and Sheridan took pleasure in showing him the sights of the country's finest city. They got into an open car at the main entrance of the Sheridan Building, and were driven first, slowly and momentously, through the wholesale district and the retail district; then more rapidly they inspected the packing-houses and the stock-yards; then skirmished over the “park system” and “boulevards”; and after that whizzed through the “residence section” on their way to the factories and foundries.
“All cray,” observed Herr Favre, smilingly.
“'Cray'?” echoed Sheridan. “I don't know what you mean. 'Cray'?”
“No white,” said Herr Favre, with a wave of his hand toward the long rows of houses on both sides of the street. “No white lace window-curtains; all cray lace window-curtains.”
“Oh. I see!” Sheridan laughed indulgently. “You mean 'GRAY.' No, they ain't, they're white. I never saw any gray ones.”
Herr Favre shook his head, much amused. “There are NO white ones,” he said. “There is no white ANYTHING in your city; no white window-curtains, no white house, no white peeble!” He pointed upward. “Smoke!” Then he sniffed the air and clasped his nose between forefinger and thumb. “Smoke! Smoke ef'rywhere. Smoke in your insites.” He tapped his chest. “Smoke in your lunks!”
“Oh! SMOKE!” Sheridan cried with gusto, drawing in a deep breath and patently finding it delicious. “You BET we got smoke!”
“Exbensif!” said Herr Favre. “Ruins foliage; ruins fabrics. Maybe in summer it iss not so bad, but I wonder your wifes will bear it.”
Sheridan laughed uproariously. “They know it means new spring hats for 'em!”
“They must need many, too!” said the visitor. “New hats, new all things, but nothing white. In Munchen we could not do it; we are a safing peeble.”
“Where's that?”
“In Munchen. You say 'Munich.'”
“Well, I never been to Munich, but I took in the Mediterranean trip, and I tell you, outside o' some right good scenery, all I saw was mighty dirty and mighty shiftless and mighty run-down at the heel. Now comin' right down TO it, Mr. Farver, wouldn't you rather live here in this town than in Munich? I know you got more enterprise up there than the part of the old country I saw, and I know YOU'RE a live business man and you're associated with others like you, but when it comes to LIVIN' in a place, wouldn't you heap rather be here than over there?”
“For me,” said Herr Favre, “no. Here I should not think I was living. It would be like the miner who goes into the mine to work; nothing else.”
“We got a good many good citizens here from your part o' the world. THEY like it.”
“Oh yes.” And Herr Favre laughed deprecatingly. “The first generation, they bring their Germany with them; then, after that, they are Americans, like you.” He tapped his host's big knee genially. “You are patriot; so are they.”
“Well, I reckon you must be a pretty hot little patriot yourself, Mr. Farver!” Sheridan exclaimed, gaily. “You certainly stand up for your own town, if you stick to sayin' you'd rather live there than you would here. Yes, SIR! You sure are some patriot to say THAT—after you've seen our city! It ain't reasonable in you, but I must say I kind of admire you for it; every man ought to stick up for his own, even when he sees the other fellow's got the goods on him. Yet I expect way down deep in your heart, Mr. Farver, you'd rather live right here than any place else in the world, if you had your choice. Man alive! this is God's country, Mr. Farver, and a blind man couldn't help seein' it! You couldn't stand where you do in a business way and NOT see it. Soho, boy! Here we are. This is the big works, and I'll show you something now that'll make your eyes stick out!”
They had arrived at the Pump Works; and for an hour Mr. Favre was personally conducted and personally instructed by the founder and president, the buzzing queen bee of those buzzing hives.
“Now I'll take you for a spin in the country,” said Sheridan, when at last they came out to the car again. “We'll take a breezer.” But, with his foot on the step, he paused to hail a neat young man who came out of the office smiling a greeting. “Hello, young fellow!” Sheridan said, heartily. “On the job, are you, Jimmie? Ha! They don't catch you OFF of it very often, I guess, though I do hear you go automobile-ridin' in the country sometimes with a mighty fine-lookin' girl settin' up beside you!” He roared with laughter, clapping his son upon the shoulder. “That's all right with me—if it is with HER! So, Jimmie? Well, when we goin' to move into your new warehouses? Monday?”
“Sunday, if you want to,” said Jim.
“No!” cried his father, delighted. “Don't tell me you're goin' to keep your word about dates! That's no way to do contractin'! Never heard of a contractor yet didn't want more time.”
“They'll be all ready for you on the minute,” said Jim. “I'm going over both of 'em now, with Links and Sherman, from foundation to roof. I guess they'll pass inspection, too!”
“Well, then, when you get through with that,” said his father, “you go and take your girl out ridin'. By George! you've earned it! You tell her you stand high with ME!” He stepped into the car, waving a waggish farewell, and when the wheels were in motion again, he turned upon his companion a broad face literally shining with pride. “That's my boy Jimmie!” he said.
“Fine young man, yes,” said Herr Favre.
“I got two o' the finest boys,” said Sheridan, “I got two o' the finest boys God ever made, and that's a fact, Mr. Farver! Jim's the oldest, and I tell you they got to get up the day before if they expect to catch HIM in bed! My other boy, Roscoe, he's always to the good, too, but Jim's a wizard. You saw them two new-process warehouses, just about finished? Well, JIM built 'em. I'll tell you about that, Mr. Farver.” And he recited this history, describing the new process at length; in fact, he had such pride in Jim's achievement that he told Herr Favre all about it more than once.
“Fine young man, yes,” repeated the good Munchner, three-quarters of an hour later. They were many miles out in the open country by this time.
“He is that!” said Sheridan, adding, as if confidentially: “I got a fine family, Mr. Farver—fine chuldern. I got a daughter now; you take her and put her anywhere you please, and she'll shine up with ANY of 'em. There's culture and refinement and society in this town by the car-load, and here lately she's been gettin' right in the thick of it—her and my daughter-in-law, both. I got a mighty fine daughter-in-law, Mr. Farver. I'm goin' to get you up for a meal with us before you leave town, and you'll see—and, well, sir, from all I hear the two of 'em been holdin' their own with the best. Myself, I and the wife never had time for much o' that kind o' doin's, but it's all right and good for the chuldern; and my daughter she's always kind of taken to it. I'll read you a poem she wrote when I get you up at the house. She wrote it in school and took the first prize for poetry with it. I tell you they don't make 'em any smarter'n that girl, Mr. Farver. Yes, sir; take us all round, we're a pretty happy family; yes, sir. Roscoe hasn't got any chuldern yet, and I haven't ever spoke to him and his wife about it—it's kind of a delicate matter—but it's about time the wife and I saw some gran'-chuldern growin' up around us. I certainly do hanker for about four or five little curly-headed rascals to take on my knee. Boys, I hope, o' course; that's only natural. Jim's got his eye on a mighty splendid-lookin' girl; lives right next door to us. I expect you heard me joshin' him about it back yonder. She's one of the ole blue-bloods here, and I guess it was a mighty good stock—to raise HER! She's one these girls that stand right up and look at you! And pretty? She's the prettiest thing you ever saw! Good size, too; good health and good sense. Jim'll be just right if he gets her. I must say it tickles ME to think o' the way that boy took ahold o' that job back yonder. Four months and a half! Yes, sir—”
He expanded this theme once more; and thus he continued to entertain the stranger throughout the long drive. Darkness had fallen before they reached the city on their return, and it was after five when Sheridan allowed Herr Favre to descend at the door of his hotel, where boys were shrieking extra editions of the evening paper.
“Now, good night, Mr. Farver,” said Sheridan, leaning from the car to shake hands with his guest. “Don't forget I'm goin' to come around and take you up to—Go on away, boy!”
A newsboy had thrust himself almost between them, yelling, “Extry! Secon' Extry. Extry, all about the horrable acciDENT. Extry!”
“Get out!” laughed Sheridan. “Who wants to read about accidents? Get out!”
The boy moved away philosophically. “Extry! Extry!” he shrilled. “Three men killed! Extry! Millionaire killed! Two other men killed! Extry! Extry!”
“Don't forget, Mr. Farver,” Sheridan completed his interrupted farewells. “I'll come by to take you up to our house for dinner. I'll be here for you about half-past five to-morrow afternoon. Hope you 'njoyed the drive much as I have. Good night—good night!” He leaned back, speaking to the chauffer. “Now you can take me around to the Central City barber-shop, boy. I want to get a shave 'fore I go up home.”
“Extry! Extry!” screamed the newsboys, zig-zagging among the crowds like bats in the dusk. “Extry! All about the horrable acciDENT! Extry!” It struck Sheridan that the papers sent out too many “Extras”; they printed “Extras” for all sorts of petty crimes and casualties. It was a mistake, he decided, critically. Crying “Wolf!” too often wouldn't sell the goods; it was bad business. The papers would “make more in the long run,” he was sure, if they published an “Extra” only when something of real importance happened.
“Extry! All about the hor'ble AX'nt! Extry!” a boy squawked under his nose, as he descended from the car.
“Go on away!” said Sheridan, gruffly, though he smiled. He liked to see the youngsters working so noisily to get on in the world.
But as he crossed the pavement to the brilliant glass doors of the barber-shop, a second newsboy grasped the arm of the one who had thus cried his wares.
“Say, Yallern,” said this second, hoarse with awe, “'n't chew know who that IS?”
“Who?”
“It's SHERIDAN!”
“Jeest!” cried the first, staring insanely.
At about the same hour, four times a week—Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday—Sheridan stopped at this shop to be shaved by the head barber. The barbers were negroes, he was their great man, and it was their habit to give him a “reception,” his entrance being always the signal for a flurry of jocular hospitality, followed by general excesses of briskness and gaiety. But it was not so this evening.
The shop was crowded. Copies of the “Extra” were being read by men waiting, and by men in the latter stages of treatment. “Extras” lay upon vacant seats and showed from the pockets of hanging coats.
There was a loud chatter between the practitioners and their recumbent patients, a vocal charivari which stopped abruptly as Sheridan opened the door. His name seemed to fizz in the air like the last sputtering of a firework; the barbers stopped shaving and clipping; lathered men turned their prostrate heads to stare, and there was a moment of amazing silence in the shop.
The head barber, nearest the door, stood like a barber in a tableau. His left hand held stretched between thumb and forefinger an elastic section of his helpless customer's cheek, while his right hand hung poised above it, the razor motionless. And then, roused from trance by the door's closing, he accepted the fact of Sheridan's presence. The barber remembered that there are no circumstances in life—or just after it—under which a man does not need to be shaved.
He stepped forward, profoundly grave. “I be through with this man in the chair one minute, Mist' Sheridan,” he said, in a hushed tone. “Yessuh.” And of a solemn negro youth who stood by, gazing stupidly, “You goin' RESIGN?” he demanded in a fierce undertone. “You goin' take Mist' Sheridan's coat?” He sent an angry look round the shop, and the barbers, taking his meaning, averted their eyes and fell to work, the murmur of subdued conversation buzzing from chair to chair.
“You sit down ONE minute, Mist' Sheridan,” said the head barber, gently. “I fix nice chair fo' you to wait in.”
“Never mind,” said Sheridan. “Go on get through with your man.”
“Yessuh.” And he went quickly back to his chair on tiptoe, followed by Sheridan's puzzled gaze.
Something had gone wrong in the shop, evidently. Sheridan did not know what to make of it. Ordinarily he would have shouted a hilarious demand for the meaning of the mystery, but an inexplicable silence had been imposed upon him by the hush that fell upon his entrance and by the odd look every man in the shop had bent upon him.
Vaguely disquieted, he walked to one of the seats in the rear of the shop, and looked up and down the two lines of barbers, catching quickly shifted, furtive glances here and there. He made this brief survey after wondering if one of the barbers had died suddenly, that day, or the night before; but there was no vacancy in either line.
The seat next to his was unoccupied, but some one had left a copy of the “Extra” there, and, frowning, he picked it up and glanced at it. The first of the swollen display lines had little meaning to him:
Fatally Faulty. New Process Roof Collapses Hurling Capitalist to
Death with Inventor. Seven Escape When Crash Comes. Death Claims—
Thus far had he read when a thin hand fell upon the paper, covering the print from his eyes; and, looking up, he saw Bibbs standing before him, pale and gentle, immeasurably compassionate.
“I've come for you, father,” said Bibbs. “Here's the boy with your coat and hat. Put them on and come home.”
And even then Sheridan did not understand. So secure was he in the strength and bigness of everything that was his, he did not know what calamity had befallen him. But he was frightened.
Without a word, he followed Bibbs heavily out throught the still shop, but as they reached the pavement he stopped short and, grasping his son's sleeve with shaking fingers, swung him round so that they stood face to face.
“What—what—” His mouth could not do him the service he asked of it, he was so frightened.
“Extry!” screamed a newsboy straight in his face. “Young North Side millionaire insuntly killed! Extry!”
“Not—JIM!” said Sheridan.
Bibbs caught his father's hand in his own.
“And YOU come to tell me that?”
Sheridan did not know what he said. But in those first words and in the first anguish of the big, stricken face Bibbs understood the unuttered cry of accusation:
“Why wasn't it you?”
CHAPTER XII
Standing in the black group under gaunt trees at the cemetery, three days later, Bibbs unwillingly let an old, old thought become definite in his mind: the sickly brother had buried the strong brother, and Bibbs wondered how many million times that had happened since men first made a word to name the sons of one mother. Almost literally he had buried his strong brother, for Sheridan had gone to pieces when he saw his dead son. He had nothing to help him meet the shock, neither definite religion nor “philosophy” definite or indefinite. He could only beat his forehead and beg, over and over, to be killed with an ax, while his wife was helpless except to entreat him not to “take on,” herself adding a continuous lamentation. Edith, weeping, made truce with Sibyl and saw to it that the mourning garments were beyond criticism. Roscoe was dazed, and he shirked, justifying himself curiously by saying he “never had any experience in such matters.” So it was Bibbs, the shy outsider, who became, during this dreadful little time, the master of the house; for as strange a thing as that, sometimes, may be the result of a death. He met the relatives from out of town at the station; he set the time for the funeral and the time for meals; he selected the flowers and he selected Jim's coffin; he did all the grim things and all the other things. Jim had belonged to an order of Knights, who lengthened the rites with a picturesque ceremony of their own, and at first Bibbs wished to avoid this, but upon reflection he offered no objection—he divined that the Knights and their service would be not precisely a consolation, but a satisfaction to his father. So the Knights led the procession, with their band playing a dirge part of the long way to the cemetery; and then turned back, after forming in two lines, plumed hats sympathetically in hand, to let the hearse and the carriages pass between.
“Mighty fine-lookin' men,” said Sheridan, brokenly. “They all—all liked him. He was—” His breath caught in a sob and choked him. “He was—a Grand Supreme Herald.”
Bibbs had divined aright.
“Dust to dust,” said the minister, under the gaunt trees; and at that Sheridan shook convulsively from head to foot. All of the black group shivered, except Bibbs, when it came to “Dust to dust.” Bibbs stood passive, for he was the only one of them who had known that thought as a familiar neighbor; he had been close upon dust himself for a long, long time, and even now he could prophesy no protracted separation between himself and dust. The machine-shop had brought him very close, and if he had to go back it would probably bring him closer still; so close—as Dr. Gurney predicted—that no one would be able to tell the difference between dust and himself. And Sheridan, if Bibbs read him truly, would be all the more determined to “make a man” of him, now that there was a man less in the family. To Bibbs's knowledge, no one and nothing had ever prevented his father from carrying through his plans, once he had determined upon them; and Sheridan was incapable of believing that any plan of his would not work out according to his calculations. His nature unfitted him to accept failure. He had the gift of terrible persistence, and with unflecked confidence that his way was the only way he would hold to that way of “making a man” of Bibbs, who understood very well, in his passive and impersonal fashion, that it was a way which might make, not a man, but dust of him. But he had no shudder for the thought.
He had no shudder for that thought or for any other thought. The truth about Bibbs was in the poem which Edith had adopted: he had so thoroughly formed the over-sensitive habit of hiding his feelings that no doubt he had forgotten—by this time—where he had put some of them, especially those which concerned himself. But he had not hidden his feelings about his father where they could not be found. He was strange to his father, but his father was not strange to him. He knew that Sheridan's plans were conceived in the stubborn belief that they would bring about a good thing for Bibbs himself; and whatever the result was to be, the son had no bitterness. Far otherwise, for as he looked at the big, woeful figure, shaking and tortured, an almost unbearable pity laid hands upon Bibbs's throat. Roscoe stood blinking, his lip quivering; Edith wept audibly; Mrs. Sheridan leaned in half collapse against her husband; but Bibbs knew that his father was the one who cared.
It was over. Men in overalls stepped forward with their shovels, and Bibbs nodded quickly to Roscoe, making a slight gesture toward the line of waiting carriages. Roscoe understood—Bibbs would stay and see the grave filled; the rest were to go. The groups began to move away over the turf; wheels creaked on the graveled drive; and one by one the carriages filled and departed, the horses setting off at a walk. Bibbs gazed steadfastly at the workmen; he knew that his father kept looking back as he went toward the carriage, and that was a thing he did not want to see. But after a little while there were no sounds of wheels or hoofs on the gravel, and Bibbs, glancing up, saw that every one had gone. A coupe had been left for him, the driver dozing patiently.
The workmen placed the flowers and wreaths upon the mound and about it, and Bibbs altered the position of one or two of these, then stood looking thoughtfully at the grotesque brilliancy of that festal-seeming hillock beneath the darkening November sky. “It's too bad!” he half whispered, his lips forming the words—and his meaning was that it was too bad that the strong brother had been the one to go. For this was his last thought before he walked to the coupe and saw Mary Vertrees standing, all alone, on the other side of the drive.
She had just emerged from a grove of leafless trees that grew on a slope where the tombs were many; and behind her rose a multitude of the barbaric and classic shapes we so strangely strew about our graveyards: urn-crowned columns and stone-draped obelisks, shop-carved angels and shop-carved children poising on pillars and shafts, all lifting—in unthought pathos—their blind stoniness toward the sky. Against such a background, Bibbs was not incongruous, with his figure, in black, so long and slender, and his face so long and thin and white; nor was the undertaker's coupe out of keeping, with the shabby driver dozing on the box and the shaggy horses standing patiently in attitudes without hope and without regret. But for Mary Vertrees, here was a grotesque setting—she was a vivid, living creature of a beautiful world. And a graveyard is not the place for people to look charming.
She also looked startled and confused, but not more startled and confused than Bibbs. In “Edith's” poem he had declared his intention of hiding his heart “among the stars”; and in his boyhood one day he had successfully hidden his body in the coal-pile. He had been no comrade of other boys or of girls, and his acquaintances of a recent period were only a few fellow-invalids and the nurses at the Hood Sanitarium. All his life Bibbs had kept himself to himself—he was but a shy onlooker in the world. Nevertheless, the startled gaze he bent upon the unexpected lady before him had causes other than his shyness and her unexpectedness. For Mary Vertrees had been a shining figure in the little world of late given to the view of this humble and elusive outsider, and spectators sometimes find their hearts beating faster than those of the actors in the spectacle. Thus with Bibbs now. He started and stared; he lifted his hat with incredible awkwardness, his fingers fumbling at his forehead before they found the brim.
“Mr. Sheridan,” said Mary, “I'm afraid you'll have to take me home with you. I—” She stopped, not lacking a momentary awkwardness of her own.
“Why—why—yes,” Bibbs stammered. “I'll—I'll be de—Won't you get in?”
In that manner and in that place they exchanged their first words. Then Mary without more ado got into the coupe, and Bibbs followed, closing the door.
“You're very kind,” she said, somewhat breathlessly. “I should have had to walk, and it's beginning to get dark. It's three miles, I think.”
“Yes,” said Bibbs. “It—it is beginning to get dark. I—I noticed that.”
“I ought to tell you—I—” Mary began, confusedly. She bit her lip, sat silent a moment, then spoke with composure. “It must seem odd, my—”
“No, no!” Bibbs protested, earnestly. “Not in the—in the least.”
“It does, though,” said Mary. “I had not intended to come to the cemetery, Mr. Sheridan, but one of the men in charge at the house came and whispered to me that 'the family wished me to'—I think your sister sent him. So I came. But when we reached here I—oh, I felt that perhaps I—”
Bibbs nodded gravely. “Yes, yes,” he murmured.
“I got out on the opposite side of the carriage,” she continued. “I mean opposite from—from where all of you were. And I wandered off over in the other direction; and I didn't realize how little time it takes. From where I was I couldn't see the carriages leaving—at least I didn't notice them. So when I got back, just now, you were the only one here. I didn't know the other people in the carriage I came in, and of course they didn't think to wait for me. That's why—”
“Yes,” said Bibbs, “I—” And that seemed all he had to say just then.
Mary looked out through the dusty window. “I think we'd better be going home, if you please,” she said.
“Yes,” Bibbs agreed, not moving. “It will be dark before we get there.”
She gave him a quick little glance. “I think you must be very tired, Mr. Sheridan; and I know you have reason to be,” she said, gently. “If you'll let me, I'll—” And without explaining her purpose she opened the door on her side of the coupe and leaned out.
Bibbs started in blank perplexity, not knowing what she meant to do.
“Driver!” she called, in her clear voice, loudly. “Driver! We'd like to start, please! Driver! Stop at the house just north of Mr. Sheridan's, please.” The wheels began to move, and she leaned back beside Bibbs once more. “I noticed that he was asleep when we got in,” she said. “I suppose they have a great deal of night work.”
Bibbs drew a long breath and waited till he could command his voice. “I've never been able to apologize quickly,” he said, with his accustomed slowness, “because if I try to I stammer. My brother Roscoe whipped me once, when we were boys, for stepping on his slate-pencil. It took me so long to tell him it was an accident, he finished before I did.”
Mary Vertrees had never heard anything quite like the drawling, gentle voice or the odd implication that his not noticing the motionless state of their vehicle was an “accident.” She had formed a casual impression of him, not without sympathy, but at once she discovered that he was unlike any of her cursory and vague imaginings of him. And suddenly she saw a picture he had not intended to paint for sympathy: a sturdy boy hammering a smaller, sickly boy, and the sickly boy unresentful. Not that picture alone; others flashed before her. Instantaneously she had a glimpse of Bibbs's life and into his life. She had a queer feeling, new to her experience, of knowing him instantly. It startled her a little; and then, with some surprise, she realized that she was glad he had sat so long, after getting into the coupe, before he noticed that it had not started. What she did not realize, however, was that she had made no response to his apology, and they passed out of the cemetery gates, neither having spoken again.
Bibbs was so content with the silence he did not know that it was silence. The dusk, gathering in their small inclosure, was filled with a rich presence for him; and presently it was so dark that neither of the two could see the other, nor did even their garments touch. But neither had any sense of being alone. The wheels creaked steadily, rumbling presently on paved streets; there were the sounds, as from a distance, of the plod-plod of the horses; and sometimes the driver became audible, coughing asthmatically, or saying, “You, JOE!” with a spiritless flap of the whip upon an unresponsive back. Oblongs of light from the lamps at street-corners came swimming into the interior of the coupe and, thinning rapidly to lances, passed utterly, leaving greater darkness. And yet neither of these two last attendants at Jim Sheridan's funeral broke the silence.
It was Mary who preceived the strangeness of it—too late. Abruptly she realized that for an indefinite interval she had been thinking of her companion and not talking to him. “Mr. Sheridan,” she began, not knowing what she was going to say, but impelled to say anything, as she realized the queerness of this drive—“Mr. Sheridan, I—”
The coupe stopped. “You, JOE!” said the driver, reproachfully, and climbed down and opened the door.
“What's the trouble?” Bibbs inquired.
“Lady said stop at the first house north of Mr. Sheridan's, sir.”
Mary was incredulous; she felt that it couldn't be true and that it mustn't be true that they had driven all the way without speaking.
“What?” Bibbs demanded.
“We're there, sir,” said the driver, sympathetically. “Next house north of Mr. Sheridan's.”
Bibbs descended to the curb. “Why, yes,” he said. “Yes, you seem to be right.” And while he stood staring at the dimly illuminated front windows of Mr. Vertrees's house Mary got out, unassisted.
“Let me help you,” said Bibbs, stepping toward her mechanically; and she was several feet from the coupe when he spoke.
“Oh no,” she murmured. “I think I can—” She meant that she could get out of the coupe without help, but, perceiving that she had already accomplished this feat, she decided not to complete the sentence.
“You, JOE!” cried the driver, angrily, climbing to his box. And he rumbled away at his team's best pace—a snail's.
“Thank you for bringing me home, Mr. Sheridan,” said Mary, stiffly. She did not offer her hand. “Good night.”
“Good night,” Bibbs said in response, and, turning with her, walked beside her to the door. Mary made that a short walk; she almost ran. Realization of the queerness of their drive was growing upon her, beginning to shock her; she stepped aside from the light that fell through the glass panels of the door and withheld her hand as it touched the old-fashioned bell-handle.
“I'm quite safe, thank you,” she said, with a little emphasis. “Good night.”
“Good night,” said Bibbs, and went obediently. When he reached the street he looked back, but she had vanished within the house.
Moving slowly away, he caromed against two people who were turning out from the pavement to cross the street. They were Roscoe and his wife.
“Where are your eyes, Bibbs?” demanded Roscoe. “Sleep-walking, as usual?”
But Sibyl took the wanderer by the arm. “Come over to our house for a little while, Bibbs,” she urged. “I want to—”
“No, I'd better—”
“Yes. I want you to. Your father's gone to bed, and they're all quiet over there—all worn out. Just come for a minute.”
He yielded, and when they were in the house she repeated herself with real feeling: “'All worn out!' Well, if anybody is, YOU are, Bibbs! And I don't wonder; you've done every bit of the work of it. You mustn't get down sick again. I'm going to make you take a little brandy.”
He let her have her own way, following her into the dining-room, and was grateful when she brought him a tiny glass filled from one of the decanters on the sideboard. Roscoe gloomily poured for himself a much heavier libation in a larger glass; and the two men sat, while Sibyl leaned against the sideboard, reviewing the episodes of the day and recalling the names of the donors of flowers and wreaths. She pressed Bibbs to remain longer when he rose to go, and then, as he persisted, she went with him to the front door. He opened it, and she said:
“Bibbs, you were coming out of the Vertreeses' house when we met you. How did you happen to be there?”
“I had only been to the door,” he said. “Good night, Sibyl.”
“Wait,” she insisted. “We saw you coming out.”
“I wasn't,” he explained, moving to depart. “I'd just brought Miss Vertrees home.”
“What?” she cried.
“Yes,” he said, and stepped out upon the porch, “that was it. Good night, Sibyl.”
“Wait!” she said, following him across the threshold. “How did that happen? I thought you were going to wait while those men filled the—the—” She paused, but moved nearer him insistently.
“I did wait. Miss Vertrees was there,” he said, reluctantly. “She had walked away for a while and didn't notice that the carriages were leaving. When she came back the coupe waiting for me was the only one left.”
Sibyl regarded him with dilating eyes. She spoke with a slow breathlessness. “And she drove home from Jim's funeral—with you!”
Without warning she burst into laughter, clapped her hand ineffectually over her mouth, and ran back uproariously into the house, hurling the door shut behind her.
CHAPTER XIII
Bibbs went home pondering. He did not understand why Sibyl had laughed. The laughter itself had been spontaneous and beyond suspicion, but it seemed to him that she had only affected the effort to suppress it and that she wished it to be significant. Significant of what? And why had she wished to impress upon him the fact of her overwhelming amusement? He found no answer, but she had succeeded in disturbing him, and he wished that he had not encountered her.
At home, uncles, aunts, and cousins from out of town were wandering about the house, several mournfully admiring the “Bay of Naples,” and others occupied with the Moor and the plumbing, while they waited for trains. Edith and her mother had retired to some upper fastness, but Bibbs interviewed Jackson and had the various groups of relatives summoned to the dining-room for food. One great-uncle, old Gideon Sheridan from Boonville, could not be found, and Bibbs went in search of him. He ransacked the house, discovering the missing antique at last by accident. Passing his father's closed door on tiptoe, Bibbs heard a murmurous sound, and paused to listen. The sound proved to be a quavering and rickety voice, monotonously bleating:
“The Lo-ord givuth and the Lo-ord takuth away! We got to remember that; we got to remember that! I'm a-gittin' along, James; I'm a-gittin' along, and I've seen a-many of 'em go—two daughters and a son the Lord give me, and He has taken all away. For the Lo-ord givuth and the Lo-ord takuth away! Remember the words of Bildad the Shuhite, James. Bildad the Shuhite says, 'He shall have neither son nor nephew among his people, nor any remaining in his dwellings.' Bildad the Shuhite—”
Bibbs opened the door softly. His father was lying upon the bed, in his underclothes, face downward, and Uncle Gideon sat near by, swinging backward and forward in a rocking-chair, stroking his long white beard and gazing at the ceiling as he talked. Bibbs beckoned him urgently, but Uncle Gideon paid no attention.
“Bildad the Shuhite spake and he says, 'If thy children have sinned against Him and He have cast them away—'”
There was a muffled explosion beneath the floor, and the windows rattled. The figure lying face downward on the bed did not move, but Uncle Gideon leaped from his chair. “My God!” he cried. “What's that?”
There came a second explosion, and Uncle Gideon ran out into the hall. Bibbs went to the head of the great staircase, and, looking down, discovered the source of the disturbance. Gideon's grandson, a boy of fourteen, had brought his camera to the funeral and was taking “flash-lights” of the Moor. Uncle Gideon, reassured by Bibbs's explanation, would have returned to finish his quotation from Bildad the Shuhite, but Bibbs detained him, and after a little argument persuaded him to descend to the dining-room whither Bibbs followed, after closing the door of his father's room.
He kept his eye on Gideon after dinner, diplomatically preventing several attempts on the part of that comforter to reascend the stairs; and it was a relief to Bibbs when George announced that an automobile was waiting to convey the ancient man and his grandson to their train. They were the last to leave, and when they had gone Bibbs went sighing to his own room.
He stretched himself wearily upon the bed, but presently rose, went to the window, and looked for a long time at the darkened house where Mary Vertrees lived. Then he opened his trunk, took therefrom a small note-book half filled with fragmentary scribblings, and began to write:
Laughter after a funeral. In this reaction people will laugh at anything and at nothing. The band plays a dirge on the way to the cemetery, but when it turns back, and the mourning carriages are out of hearing, it strikes up, “Darktown is Out To-night.” That is natural—but there are women whose laughter is like the whirring of whips. Why is it that certain kinds of laughter seem to spoil something hidden away from the laughers? If they do not know of it, and have never seen it, how can their laughter hurt it? Yet it does. Beauty is not out of place among grave-stones. It is not out of place anywhere. But a woman who has been betrothed to a man would not look beautiful at his funeral. A woman might look beautiful, though, at the funeral of a man whom she had known and liked. And in that case, too, she would probably not want to talk if she drove home from the cemetery with his brother: nor would she want the brother to talk. Silence is usually either stupid or timid. But for a man who stammers if he tries to talk fast, and drawls so slowly, when he doesn't stammer, that nobody has time to listen to him, silence is advisable. Nevertheless, too much silence is open to suspicion. It may be reticence, or it may be a vacuum. It may be dignity, or it may be false teeth.
Sometimes an imperceptible odor will become perceptible in a small inclosure, such as a closed carriage. The ghost of gasoline rising from a lady's glove might be sweeter to the man riding beside her than all the scents of Arcady in spring. It depends on the lady— but there ARE! Three miles may be three hundred miles, or it may be three feet. When it is three feet you have not time to say a great deal before you reach the end of it. Still, it may be that one should begin to speak.
No one could help wishing to stay in a world that holds some of the people that are in this world. There are some so wonderful you do not understand how the dead COULD die. How could they let themselves? A falling building does not care who falls with it. It does not choose who shall be upon its roof and who shall not. Silence CAN be golden? Yes. But perhaps if a woman of the world should find herself by accident sitting beside a man for the length of time it must necessarily take two slow old horses to jog three miles, she might expect that man to say something of some sort! Even if she thought him a feeble hypochondriac, even if she had heard from others that he was a disappointment to his own people, even if she had seen for herself that he was a useless and irritating encumbrance everywhere, she might expect him at least to speak—she might expect him to open his mouth and try to make sounds, if he only barked. If he did not even try, but sat every step of the way as dumb as a frozen fish, she might THINK him a frozen fish. And she might be right. She might be right if she thought him about as pleasant a companion as—as Bildad the Shuhite!
Bibbs closed his note-book, replacing it in his trunk. Then, after a period of melancholy contemplation, he undressed, put on a dressing-gown and slippers, and went softly out into the hall—to his father's door. Upon the floor was a tray which Bibbs had sent George, earlier in the evening, to place upon a table in Sheridan's room—but the food was untouched. Bibbs stood listening outside the door for several minutes. There came no sound from within, and he went back to his own room and to bed.
In the morning he woke to a state of being hitherto unknown in his experience. Sometimes in the process of waking there is a little pause—sleep has gone, but coherent thought has not begun. It is a curious half-void, a glimpse of aphasia; and although the person experiencing it may not know for that instant his own name or age or sex, he may be acutely conscious of depression or elation. It is the moment, as we say, before we “remember”; and for the first time in Bibbs's life it came to him bringing a vague happiness. He woke to a sense of new riches; he had the feeling of a boy waking to a birthday. But when the next moment brought him his memory, he found nothing that could explain his exhilaration. On the contrary, under the circumstances it seemed grotesquely unwarranted. However, it was a brief visitation and was gone before he had finished dressing. It left a little trail, the pleased recollection of it and the puzzle of it, which remained unsolved. And, in fact, waking happily in the morning is not usually the result of a drive home from a funeral. No wonder the sequence evaded Bibbs Sheridan!
His father had gone when he came down-stairs. “Went on down to 's office, jes' same,” Jackson informed him. “Came sat breakfas'-table, all by 'mself; eat nothin'. George bring nice breakfas', but he di'n' eat a thing. Yessuh, went on down-town, jes' same he yoosta do. Yessuh, I reckon putty much ev'y-thing goin' go on same as it yoosta do.”
It struck Bibbs that Jackson was right. The day passed as other days had passed. Mrs. Sheridan and Edith were in black, and Mrs. Sheridan cried a little, now and then, but no other external difference was to be seen. Edith was quiet, but not noticeably depressed, and at lunch proved herself able to argue with her mother upon the propriety of receiving calls in the earliest stages of “mourning.” Lunch was as usual—for Jim and his father had always lunched down-town—and the afternoon was as usual. Bibbs went for his drive, and his mother went with him, as she sometimes did when the weather was pleasant. Altogether, the usualness of things was rather startling to Bibbs.
During the drive Mrs. Sheridan talked fragmentarily of Jim's childhood. “But you wouldn't remember about that,” she said, after narrating an episode. “You were too little. He was always a good boy, just like that. And he'd save whatever papa gave him, and put it in the bank. I reckon it'll just about kill your father to put somebody in his place as president of the Realty Company, Bibbs. I know he can't move Roscoe over; he told me last week he'd already put as much on Roscoe as any one man could handle and not go crazy. Oh, it's a pity—” She stopped to wipe her eyes. “It's a pity you didn't run more with Jim, Bibbs, and kind o' pick up his ways. Think what it'd meant to papa now! You never did run with either Roscoe or Jim any, even before you got sick. Of course, you were younger; but it always DID seem queer—and you three bein' brothers like that. I don't believe I ever saw you and Jim sit down together for a good talk in my life.”
“Mother, I've been away so long,” Bibbs returned, gently. “And since I came home I—”
“Oh, I ain't reproachin' you, Bibbs,” she said. “Jim ain't been home much of an evening since you got back—what with his work and callin' and goin' to the theater and places, and often not even at the house for dinner. Right the evening before he got hurt he had his dinner at some miser'ble rest'rant down by the Pump Works, he was so set on overseein' the night work and gettin' everything finished up right to the minute he told papa he would. I reckon you might 'a' put in more time with Jim if there'd been more opportunity, Bibbs. I expect you feel almost as if you scarcely really knew him right well.”
“I suppose I really didn't, mother. He was busy, you see, and I hadn't much to say about the things that interested him, because I don't know much about them.”
“It's a pity! Oh, it's a pity!” she moaned. “And you'll have to learn to know about 'em NOW, Bibbs! I haven't said much to you, because I felt it was all between your father and you, but I honestly do believe it will just kill him if he has to have any more trouble on top of all this! You mustn't LET him, Bibbs—you mustn't! You don't know how he's grieved over you, and now he can't stand any more—he just can't! Whatever he says for you to do, you DO it, Bibbs, you DO it! I want you to promise me you will.”
“I would if I could,” he said, sorrowfully.
“No, no! Why can't you?” she cried, clutching his arm. “He wants you to go back to the machine-shop and—”
“And—'like it'!” said Bibbs.
“Yes, that's it—to go in a cheerful spirit. Dr. Gurney said it wouldn't hurt you if you went in a cheerful spirit—the doctor said that himself, Bibbs. So why can't you do it? Can't you do that much for your father? You ought to think what he's done for YOU. You got a beautiful house to live in; you got automobiles to ride in; you got fur coats and warm clothes; you been taken care of all your life. And you don't KNOW how he worked for the money to give all these things to you! You don't DREAM what he had to go through and what he risked when we were startin' out in life; and you never WILL know! And now this blow has fallen on him out of a clear sky, and you make it out to be a hardship to do like he wants you to! And all on earth he asks is for you to go back to the work in a cheerful spirit, so it won't hurt you! That's all he asks. Look, Bibbs, we're gettin' back near home, but before we get there I want you to promise me that you'll do what he asks you to. Promise me!”
In her earnestness she cleared away her black veil that she might see him better, and it blew out on the smoky wind. He readjusted it for her before he spoke.
“I'll go back in as cheerful a spirit as I can, mother,” he said.
“There!” she exclaimed, satisfied. “That's a good boy! That's all I wanted you to say.”
“Don't give me any credit,” he said, ruefully. “There isn't anything else for me to do.”
“Now, don't begin talkin' THAT way!”
“No, no,” he soothed her. “We'll have to begin to make the spirit a cheerful one. We may—” They were turning into their own driveway as he spoke, and he glanced at the old house next door. Mary Vertrees was visible in the twilight, standing upon the front steps, bareheaded, the door open behind her. She bowed gravely.
“'We may'—what?” asked Mrs. Sheridan, with a slight impatience.
“What is it, mother?”
“You said, 'We may,' and didn't finish what you were sayin'.”
“Did I?” said Bibbs, blankly. “Well, what WERE we saying?”
“Of all the queer boys!” she cried. “You always were. Always! You haven't forgot what you just promised me, have you?”
“No,” he answered, as the car stopped. “No, the spirit will be as cheerful as the flesh will let it, mother. It won't do to behave like—”
His voice was low, and in her movement to descend from the car she failed to hear his final words.
“Behave like who, Bibbs?”
“Nothing.”
But she was fretful in her grief. “You said it wouldn't do to behave like SOMEBODY. Behave like WHO?”
“It was just nonsense,” he explained, turning to go in. “An obscure person I don't think much of lately.”
“Behave like WHO?” she repeated, and upon his yielding to her petulant insistence, she made up her mind that the only thing to do was to tell Dr. Gurney about it.
“Like Bildad the Shuhite!” was what Bibbs said.
CHAPTER XIV
The outward usualness of things continued after dinner. It was Sheridan's custom to read the evening paper beside the fire in the library, while his wife, sitting near by, either sewed (from old habit) or allowed herself to be repeatedly baffled by one of the simpler forms of solitaire. To-night she did neither, but sat in her customary chair, gazing at the fire, while Sheridan let the unfolded paper rest upon his lap, though now and then he lifted it, as if to read, and let it fall back upon his knees again. Bibbs came in noiselessly and sat in a corner, doing nothing; and from a “reception-room” across the hall an indistinct vocal murmur became just audible at intervals. Once, when this murmur grew louder, under stress of some irrepressible merriment, Edith's voice could be heard—“Bobby, aren't you awful!” and Sheridan glanced across at his wife appealingly.
She rose at once and went into the “reception-room”; there was a flurry of whispering, and the sound of tiptoeing in the hall—Edith and her suitor changing quarters to a more distant room. Mrs. Sheridan returned to her chair in the library.
“They won't bother you any more, papa,” she said, in a comforting voice. “She told me at lunch he'd 'phoned he wanted to come up this evening, and I said I thought he'd better wait a few days, but she said she'd already told him he could.” She paused, then added, rather guiltily: “I got kind of a notion maybe Roscoe don't like him as much as he used to. Maybe—maybe you better ask Roscoe, papa.” And as Sheridan nodded solemnly, she concluded, in haste: “Don't say I said to. I might be wrong about it, anyway.”
He nodded again, and they sat for some time in a silence which Mrs. Sheridan broke with a little sniff, having fallen into a reverie that brought tears. “That Miss Vertrees was a good girl,” she said. “SHE was all right.”
Her husband evidently had no difficulty in following her train of thought, for he nodded once more, affirmatively.
“Did you—How did you fix it about the—the Realty Company?” she faltered. “Did you—”
He rose heavily, helping himself to his feet by the arms of his chair. “I fixed it,” he said, in a husky voice. “I moved Cantwell up, and put Johnston in Cantwell's place, and split up Johnston's work among the four men with salaries high enough to take it.” He went to her, put his hand upon her shoulder, and drew a long, audible, tremulous breath. “It's my bedtime, mamma; I'm goin' up.” He dropped the hand from her shoulder and moved slowly away, but when he reached the door he stopped and spoke again, without turning to look at her. “The Realty Company'll go right on just the same,” he said. “It's like—it's like sand, mamma. It puts me in mind of chuldern playin' in a sand-pile. One of 'em sticks his finger in the sand and makes a hole, and another of 'em'll pat the place with his hand, and all the little grains of sand run in and fill it up and settle against one another; and then, right away it's flat on top again, and you can't tell there ever was a hole there. The Realty Company'll go on all right, mamma. There ain't anything anywhere, I reckon, that wouldn't go right on—just the same.”
And he passed out slowly into the hall; then they heard his heavy tread upon the stairs.
Mrs. Sheridan, rising to follow him, turned a piteous face to her son. “It's so forlone,” she said, chokingly. “That's the first time he spoke since he came in the house this evening. I know it must 'a' hurt him to hear Edith laughin' with that Lamhorn. She'd oughtn't to let him come, right the very first evening this way; she'd oughtn't to done it! She just seems to lose her head over him, and it scares me. You heard what Sibyl said the other day, and—and you heard what—what—”
“What Edith said to Sibyl?” Bibbs finished the sentence for her.
“We CAN'T have any trouble o' THAT kind!” she wailed. “Oh, it looks as if movin' up to this New House had brought us awful bad luck! It scares me!” She put both her hands over her face. “Oh, Bibbs, Bibbs! if you only wasn't so QUEER! If you could only been a kind of dependable son! I don't know what we're all comin' to!” And, weeping, she followed her husband.
Bibbs gazed for a while at the fire; then he rose abruptly, like a man who has come to a decision, and briskly sought the room—it was called “the smoking-room”—where Edith sat with Mr. Lamhorn. They looked up in no welcoming manner, at Bibbs's entrance, and moved their chairs to a less conspicuous adjacency.
“Good evening,” said Bibbs, pleasantly; and he seated himself in a leather easy-chair near them.
“What is it?” asked Edith, plainly astonished.
“Nothing,” he returned, smiling.
She frowned. “Did you want something?” she asked.
“Nothing in the world. Father and mother have gone up-stairs; I sha'n't be going up for several hours, and there didn't seem to be anybody left for me to chat with except you and Mr. Lamhorn.”
“'CHAT with'!” she echoed, incredulously.
“I can talk about almost anything,” said Bibbs with an air of genial politeness. “It doesn't matter to ME. I don't know much about business—if that's what you happened to be talking about. But you aren't in business, are you, Mr. Lamhorn?”
“Not now,” returned Lamhorn, shortly.
“I'm not, either,” said Bibbs. “It was getting cloudier than usual, I noticed, just before dark, and there was wind from the southwest. Rain to-morrow, I shouldn't be surprised.”
He seemed to feel that he had begun a conversation the support of which had now become the pleasurable duty of other parties; and he sat expectantly, looking first at his sister, then at Lamhorn, as if implying that it was their turn to speak. Edith returned his gaze with a mixture of astonishment and increasing anger, while Mr. Lamhorn was obviously disturbed, though Bibbs had been as considerate as possible in presenting the weather as a topic. Bibbs had perceived that Lamhorn had nothing in his mind at any time except “personalities”—he could talk about people and he could make love. Bibbs, wishing to be courteous, offered the weather.
Lamhorn refused it, and concluded from Bibbs's luxurious attitude in the leather chair that this half-crazy brother was a permanent fixture for the rest of the evening. There was not reason to hope that he would move, and Lamhorn found himself in danger of looking silly.
“I was just going,” he said, rising.
“Oh NO!” Edith cried, sharply.
“Yes. Good night! I think I—”
“Too bad,” said Bibbs, genially, walking to the door with the visitor, while Edith stood staring as the two disappeared in the hall. She heard Bibbs offering to “help” Lamhorn with his overcoat and the latter rather curtly declining assistance, these episodes of departure being followed by the closing of the outer door. She ran into the hall.
“What's the matter with you?” she cried, furiously. “What do you MEAN? How did you dare come in there when you knew—”
Her voice broke; she made a gesture of rage and despair, and ran up the stairs, sobbing. She fled to her mother's room, and when Bibbs came up, a few minutes later, Mrs. Sheridan met him at his door.
“Oh, Bibbs,” she said, shaking her head woefully, “you'd oughtn't to distress your sister! She says you drove that young man right out of the house. You'd ought to been more considerate.”
Bibbs smiled faintly, noting that Edith's door was open, with Edith's naive shadow motionless across its threshold. “Yes,” he said. “He doesn't appear to be much of a 'man's man.' He ran at just a glimpse of one.”
Edith's shadow moved; her voice came quavering: “You call yourself one?”
“No, no,” he answered. “I said, 'just a glimpse of one.' I didn't claim—” But her door slammed angrily; and he turned to his mother.
“There,” he said, sighing. “That's almost the first time in my life I ever tried to be a man of action, mother, and I succeeded perfectly in what I tried to do. As a consequence I feel like a horse-thief!”
“You hurt her feelin's,” she groaned. “You must 'a' gone at it too rough, Bibbs.”
He looked upon her wanly. “That's my trouble, mother,” he murmured. “I'm a plain, blunt fellow. I have rough ways, and I'm a rough man.”
For once she perceived some meaning in his queerness. “Hush your nonsense!” she said, good-naturedly, the astral of a troubled smile appearing. “You go to bed.”
He kissed her and obeyed.
Edith gave him a cold greeting the next morning at the breakfast-table.
“You mustn't do that under a misapprehension,” he warned her, when they were alone in the dining-room.
“Do what under a what?” she asked.
“Speak to me. I came into the smoking-room last night 'on purpose,'” he told her, gravely. “I have a prejudice against that young man.”
She laughed. “I guess you think it means a great deal who you have prejudices against!” In mockery she adopted the manner of one who implores. “Bibbs, for pity's sake PROMISE me, DON'T use YOUR influence with papa against him!” And she laughed louder.
“Listen,” he said, with peculiar earnestness. “I'll tell you now, because—because I've decided I'm one of the family.” And then, as if the earnestness were too heavy for him to carry it further, he continued, in his usual tone, “I'm drunk with power, Edith.”
“What do you want to tell me?” she demanded, brusquely.
“Lamhorn made love to Sibyl,” he said.
Edith hooted. “SHE did to HIM! And because you overheard that spat between us the other day when I the same as accused her of it, and said something like that to you afterward—”
“No,” he said, gravely. “I KNOW.”
“How?”
“I was there, one day a week ago, with Roscoe, and I heard Sibyl and Lamhorn—”
Edith screamed with laughter. “You were with ROSCOE—and you heard Lamhorn making love to Sibyl!”
“No. I heard them quarreling.”
“You're funnier than ever, Bibbs!” she cried. “You say he made love to her because you heard them quarreling!”
“That's it. If you want to know what's 'between' people, you can—by the way they quarrel.”
“You'll kill me, Bibbs! What were they quarreling about?”
“Nothing. That's how I knew. People who quarrel over nothing!—it's always certain—”
Edith stopped laughing abruptly, but continued her mockery. “You ought to know. You've had so much experience, yourself!”
“I haven't any, Edith,” he said. “My life has been about as exciting as an incubator chicken's. But I look out through the glass at things.”
“Well, then,” she said, “if you look out through the glass you must know what effect such stuff would have upon ME!” She rose, visibly agitated. “What if it WAS true?” she demanded, bitterly. “What if it was true a hundred times over? You sit there with your silly face half ready to giggle and half ready to sniffle, and tell me stories like that, about Sibyl picking on Bobby Lamhorn and worrying him to death, and you think it matters to ME? What if I already KNEW all about their 'quarreling'? What if I understood WHY she—” She broke off with a violent gesture, a sweep of her arm extended at full length, as if she hurled something to the ground. “Do you think a girl that really cared for a man would pay any attention to THAT? Or to YOU, Bibbs Sheridan!”
He looked at her steadily, and his gaze was as keen as it was steady. She met it with unwavering pride. Finally he nodded slowly, as if she had spoken and he meant to agree with what she said.
“Ah, yes,” he said. “I won't come into the smoking-room again. I'm sorry, Edith. Nobody can make you see anything now. You'll never see until you see for yourself. The rest of us will do better to keep out of it—especially me!”
“That's sensible,” she responded, curtly. “You're most surprising of all when you're sensible, Bibbs.”
“Yes,” he sighed. “I'm a dull dog. Shake hands and forgive me, Edith.”
Thawing so far as to smile, she underwent this brief ceremony, and George appeared, summoning Bibbs to the library; Dr. Gurney was waiting there, he announced. And Bibbs gave his sister a shy but friendly touch upon the shoulder as a complement to the handshaking, and left her.
Dr. Gurney was sitting by the log fire, alone in the room, and he merely glanced over his shoulder when his patient came in. He was not over fifty, in spite of Sheridan's habitual “ole Doc Gurney.” He was gray, however, almost as thin as Bibbs, and nearly always he looked drowsy.
“Your father telephoned me yesterday afternoon, Bibbs,” he said, not rising. “Wants me to 'look you over' again. Come around here in front of me—between me and the fire. I want to see if I can see through you.”
“You mean you're too sleepy to move,” returned Bibbs, complying. “I think you'll notice that I'm getting worse.”
“Taken on about twelve pounds,” said Gurney. “Thirteen, maybe.”
“Twelve.”
“Well, it won't do.” The doctor rubbed his eyelids. “You're so much better I'll have to use some machinery on you before we can know just where you are. You come down to my place this afternoon. Walk down—all the way. I suppose you know why your father wants to know.”
Bibbs nodded. “Machine-shop.”
“Still hate it?”
Bibbs nodded again.
“Don't blame you!” the doctor grunted. “Yes, I expect it'll make a lump in your gizzard again. Well, what do you say? Shall I tell him you've got the old lump there yet? You still want to write, do you?”
“What's the use?” Bibbs said, smiling ruefully. “My kind of writing!”
“Yes,” the doctor agreed. “I suppose if you broke away and lived on roots and berries until you began to 'attract the favorable attention of editors' you might be able to hope for an income of four or five hundred dollars a year by the time you're fifty.”
“That's about it,” Bibbs murmured.
“Of course I know what you want to do,” said Gurney, drowsily. “You don't hate the machine-shop only; you hate the whole show—the noise and jar and dirt, the scramble—the whole bloomin' craze to 'get on.' You'd like to go somewhere in Algiers, or to Taormina, perhaps, and bask on a balcony, smelling flowers and writing sonnets. You'd grow fat on it and have a delicate little life all to yourself. Well, what do you say? I can lie like sixty, Bibbs! Shall I tell your father he'll lose another of his boys if you don't go to Sicily?”
“I don't want to go to Sicily,” said Bibbs. “I want to stay right here.”
The doctor's drowsiness disappeared for a moment, and he gave his patient a sharp glance. “It's a risk,” he said. “I think we'll find you're so much better he'll send you back to the shop pretty quick. Something's got hold of you lately; you're not quite so lackadaisical as you used to be. But I warn you: I think the shop will knock you just as it did before, and perhaps even harder, Bibbs.”
He rose, shook himself, and rubbed his eyelids. “Well, when we go over you this afternoon what are we going to say about it?”
“Tell him I'm ready,” said Bibbs, looking at the floor.
“Oh no,” Gurney laughed. “Not quite yet; but you may be almost. We'll see. Don't forget I said to walk down.”
And when the examination was concluded, that afternoon, the doctor informed Bibbs that the result was much too satisfactory to be pleasing. “Here's a new 'situation' for a one-act farce,” he said, gloomily, to his next patient when Bibbs had gone. “Doctor tells a man he's well, and that's his death sentence, likely. Dam' funny world!”
Bibbs decided to walk home, though Gurney had not instructed him upon this point. In fact, Gurney seemed to have no more instructions on any point, so discouraging was the young man's improvement. It was a dingy afternoon, and the smoke was evident not only to Bibbs's sight, but to his nostrils, though most of the pedestrians were so saturated with the smell they could no longer detect it. Nearly all of them walked hurriedly, too intent upon their destinations to be more than half aware of the wayside; they wore the expressions of people under a vague yet constant strain. They were all lightly powdered, inside and out, with fine dust and grit from the hard-paved streets, and they were unaware of that also. They did not even notice that they saw the smoke, though the thickened air was like a shrouding mist. And when Bibbs passed the new “Sheridan Apartments,” now almost completed, he observed that the marble of the vestibule was already streaky with soot, like his gloves, which were new.
That recalled to him the faint odor of gasolene in the coupe on the way from his brother's funeral, and this incited a train of thought which continued till he reached the vicinity of his home. His route was by a street parallel to that on which the New House fronted, and in his preoccupation he walked a block farther than he intended, so that, having crossed to his own street, he approached the New House from the north, and as he came to the corner of Mr. Vertrees's lot Mr. Vertrees's daughter emerged from the front door and walked thoughtfully down the path to the old picket gate. She was unconscious of the approach of the pedestrian from the north, and did not see him until she had opened the gate and he was almost beside her. Then she looked up, and as she saw him she started visibly. And if this thing had happened to Robert Lamhorn, he would have had a thought far beyond the horizon of faint-hearted Bibbs's thoughts. Lamhorn, indeed, would have spoken his thought. He would have said: “You jumped because you were thinking of me!”
CHAPTER XV
Mary was the picture of a lady flustered. She stood with one hand closing the gate behind her, and she had turned to go in the direction Bibbs was walking. There appeared to be nothing for it but that they should walk together, at least as far as the New House. But Bibbs had paused in his slow stride, and there elapsed an instant before either spoke or moved—it was no longer than that, and yet it sufficed for each to seem to say, by look and attitude, “Why, it's YOU!”
Then they both spoke at once, each hurriedly pronouncing the other's name as if about to deliver a message of importance. Then both came to a stop simultaneously, but Bibbs made a heroic effort, and as they began to walk on together he contrived to find his voice.
“I—I—hate a frozen fish myself,” he said. “I think three miles was too long for you to put up with one.”
“Good gracious!” she cried, turning to him a glowing face from which restraint and embarrassment had suddenly fled. “Mr. Sheridan, you're lovely to put it that way. But it's always the girl's place to say it's turning cooler! I ought to have been the one to show that we didn't know each other well enough not to say SOMETHING! It was an imposition for me to have made you bring me home, and after I went into the house I decided I should have walked. Besides, it wasn't three miles to the car-line. I never thought of it!”
“No,” said Bibbs, earnestly. “I didn't, either. I might have said something if I'd thought of anything. I'm talking now, though; I must remember that, and not worry about it later. I think I'm talking, though it doesn't sound intelligent even to me. I made up my mind that if I ever met you again I'd turn on my voice and keep it going, no mater what it said. I—”
She interrupted him with laughter, and Mary Vertrees's laugh was one which Bibbs's father had declared, after the house-warming, “a cripple would crawl five miles to hear.” And at the merry lilting of it Bibbs's father's son took heart to forget some of his trepidation. “I'll be any kind of idiot,” he said, “if you'll laugh at me some more. It won't be difficult for me.”
She did; and Bibbs's cheeks showed a little actual color, which Mary perceived. It recalled to her, by contrast, her careless and irritated description of him to her mother just after she had seen him for the first time. “Rather tragic and altogether impossible.” It seemed to her now that she must have been blind.
They had passed the New House without either of them showing—or possessing—any consciousness that it had been the destination of one of them.
“I'll keep on talking,” Bibbs continued, cheerfully, “and you keep on laughing. I'm amounting to something in the world this afternoon. I'm making a noise, and that makes you make music. Don't be bothered by my bleating out such things as that. I'm really frightened, and that makes me bleat anything. I'm frightened about two things: I'm afraid of what I'll think of myself later if I don't keep talking—talking now, I mean—and I'm afraid of what I'll think of myself if I do. And besides these two things, I'm frightened, anyhow. I don't remember talking as much as this more than once or twice in my life. I suppose it was always in me to do it, though, the first time I met any one who didn't know me well enough not to listen.”
“But you're not really talking to me,” said Mary. “You're just thinking aloud.”
“No,” he returned, gravely. “I'm not thinking at all; I'm only making vocal sounds because I believe it's more mannerly. I seem to be the subject of what little meaning they possess, and I'd like to change it, but I don't know how. I haven't any experience in talking, and I don't know how to manage it.”
“You needn't change the subject on my account, Mr. Sheridan,” she said. “Not even if you really talked about yourself.” She turned her face toward him as she spoke, and Bibbs caught his breath; he was pathetically amazed by the look she gave him. It was a glowing look, warmly friendly and understanding, and, what almost shocked him, it was an eagerly interested look. Bibbs was not accustomed to anything like that.
“I—you—I—I'm—” he stammered, and the faint color in his cheeks grew almost vivid.
She was still looking at him, and she saw the strange radiance that came into his face. There was something about him, too, that explained how “queer” many people might think him; but he did not seem “queer” to Mary Vertrees; he seemed the most quaintly natural person she had ever met.
He waited, and became coherent. “YOU say something now,” he said. “I don't even belong in the chorus, and here I am, trying to sing the funny man's solo! You—”
“No,” she interrupted. “I'd rather play your accompaniment.”
“I'll stop and listen to it, then.”
“Perhaps—” she began, but after pausing thoughtfully she made a gesture with her muff, indicating a large brick church which they were approaching. “Do you see that church, Mr. Sheridan?”
“I suppose I could,” he answered in simple truthfulness, looking at her. “But I don't want to. Once, when I was ill, the nurse told me I'd better say anything that was on my mind, and I got the habit. The other reason I don't want to see the church is that I have a feeling it's where you're going, and where I'll be sent back.”
She shook her head in cheery negation. “Not unless you want to be. Would you like to come with me?”
“Why—why—yes,” he said. “Anywhere!” And again it was apparent that he spoke in simple truthfulness.
“Then come—if you care for organ music. The organist is an old friend of mine, and sometimes he plays for me. He's a dear old man. He had a degree from Bonn, and was a professor afterward, but he gave up everything for music. That's he, waiting in the doorway. He looks like Beethoven, doesn't he? I think he knows that, perhaps and enjoys it a little. I hope so.”
“Yes,” said Bibbs, as they reached the church steps. “I think Beethoven would like it, too. It must be pleasant to look like other people.”
“I haven't kept you?” Mary said to the organist.
“No, no,” he answered, heartily. “I would not mind so only you should shooer come!”
“This is Mr. Sheridan, Dr. Kraft. He has come to listen with me.”
The organist looked bluntly surprised. “Iss that SO?” he exclaimed. “Well, I am glad if you wish him, and if he can stant my liddle playink. He iss musician himself, then, of course.”
“No,” said Bibbs, as the three entered the church together. “I—I played the—I tried to play—” Fortunately he checked himself; he had been about to offer the information that he had failed to master the jews'-harp in his boyhood. “No, I'm not a musician,” he contented himself with saying.
“What?” Dr. Kraft's surprise increased. “Young man, you are fortunate! I play for Miss Vertrees; she comes always alone. You are the first. You are the first one EVER!”
They had reached the head of the central aisle, and as the organist finished speaking Bibbs stopped short, turning to look at Mary Vertrees in a dazed way that was not of her perceiving; for, though she stopped as he did, her gaze followed the organist, who was walking away from them toward the front of the church, shaking his white Beethovian mane roguishly.
“It's false pretenses on my part,” Bibbs said. “You mean to be kind to the sick, but I'm not an invalid any more. I'm so well I'm going back to work in a few days. I'd better leave before he begins to play, hadn't I?”
“No,” said Mary, beginning to walk forward. “Not unless you don't like great music.”
He followed her to a seat about half-way up the aisle while Dr. Kraft ascended to the organ. It was an enormous one, the procession of pipes ranging from long, starveling whistles to thundering fat guns; they covered all the rear wall of the church, and the organist's figure, reaching its high perch, looked like that of some Lilliputian magician ludicrously daring the attempt to control a monster certain to overwhelm him.
“This afternoon some Handel!” he turned to shout.
Mary nodded. “Will you like that?” she asked Bibbs.
“I don't know. I never heard any except 'Largo.' I don't know anything about music. I don't even know how to pretend I do. If I knew enough to pretend, I would.”
“No,” said Mary, looking at him and smiling faintly, “you wouldn't.”
She turned away as a great sound began to swim and tremble in the air; the huge empty space of the church filled with it, and the two people listening filled with it; the universe seemed to fill and thrill with it. The two sat intensely still, the great sound all round about them, while the church grew dusky, and only the organist's lamp made a tiny star of light. His white head moved from side to side beneath it rhythmically, or lunged and recovered with the fierceness of a duelist thrusting, but he was magnificently the master of his giant, and it sang to his magic as he bade it.
Bibbs was swept away upon that mighty singing. Such a thing was wholly unknown to him; there had been no music in his meager life. Unlike the tale, it was the Princess Bedrulbudour who had brought him to the enchanted cave, and that—for Bibbs—was what made its magic dazing. It seemed to him a long, long time since he had been walking home drearily from Dr. Gurney's office; it seemed to him that he had set out upon a happy journey since then, and that he had reached another planet, where Mary Vertrees and he sat alone together listening to a vast choiring of invisible soldiers and holy angels. There were armies of voices about them singing praise and thanksgiving; and yet they were alone. It was incredible that the walls of the church were not the boundaries of the universe, to remain so for ever; incredible that there was a smoky street just yonder, where housemaids were bringing in evening papers from front steps and where children were taking their last spins on roller-skates before being haled indoors for dinner.
He had a curious sense of communication with his new friend. He knew it could not be so, and yet he felt as if all the time he spoke to her, saying: “You hear this strain? You hear that strain? You know the dream that these sounds bring to me?” And it seemed to him as though she answered continually: “I hear! I hear that strain, and I hear the new one that you are hearing now. I know the dream that these sounds bring to you. Yes, yes, I hear it all! We hear—together!”
And though the church grew so dim that all was mysterious shadow except the vague planes of the windows and the organist's light, with the white head moving beneath it, Bibbs had no consciousness that the girl sitting beside him had grown shadowy; he seemed to see her as plainly as ever in the darkness, though he did not look at her. And all the mighty chanting of the organ's multitudinous voices that afternoon seemed to Bibbs to be chorusing of her and interpreting her, singing her thoughts and singing for him the world of humble gratitude that was in his heart because she was so kind to him. It all meant Mary.
CHAPTER XVI
But when she asked him what it meant, on their homeward way, he was silent. They had come a few paces from the church without speaking, walking slowly.
“I'll tell you what it meant to me,” she said, as he did not immediately reply. “Almost any music of Handel's always means one thing above all others to me: courage! That's it. It makes cowardice of whining seem so infinitesimal—it makes MOST things in our hustling little lives seem infinitesimal.”
“Yes,” he said. “It seems odd, doesn't it, that people down-town are hurrying to trains and hanging to straps in trolley-cars, weltering every way to get home and feed and sleep so they can get down-town to-morrow. And yet there isn't anything down there worth getting to. They're like servants drudging to keep the house going, and believing the drudgery itself is the great thing. They make so much noise and fuss and dirt they forget that the house was meant to live in. The housework has to be done, but the people who do it have been so overpaid that they're confused and worship the housework. They're overpaid, and yet, poor things! they haven't anything that a chicken can't have. Of course, when the world gets to paying its wages sensibly that will be different.”
“Do you mean 'communism'?” she asked, and she made their slow pace a little slower—they had only three blocks to go.
“Whatever the word is, I only mean that things don't look very sensible now—especially to a man that wants to keep out of 'em and can't! 'Communism'? Well, at least any 'decent sport' would say it's fair for all the strong runners to start from the same mark and give the weak ones a fair distance ahead, so that all can run something like even on the stretch. And wouldn't it be pleasant, really, if they could all cross the winning-line together? Who really enjoys beating anybody—if he sees the beaten man's face? The only way we can enjoy getting ahead of other people nowadays is by forgetting what the other people feel. And that,” he added, “is nothing of what the music meant to me. You see, if I keep talking about what it didn't mean I can keep from telling you what it did mean.”
“Didn't it mean courage to you, too—a little?” she asked. “Triumph and praise were in it, and somehow those things mean courage to me.”
“Yes, they were all there,” Bibbs said. “I don't know the name of what he played, but I shouldn't think it would matter much. The man that makes the music must leave it to you what it can mean to you, and the name he puts to it can't make much difference—except to himself and people very much like him, I suppose.”
“I suppose that's true, though I'd never thought of it like that.”
“I imagine music must make feelings and paint pictures in the minds of the people who hear it,” Bibbs went on, musingly, “according to their own natures as much as according to the music itself. The musician might compose something and play it, wanting you to think of the Holy Grail, and some people who heard it would think of a prayer-meeting, and some would think of how good they were themselves, and a boy might think of himself at the head of a solemn procession, carrying a banner and riding a white horse. And then, if there were some jubilant passages in the music, he'd think of a circus.”
They had reached her gate, and she set her hand upon it, but did not open it. Bibbs felt that this was almost the kindest of her kindnesses—not to be prompt in leaving him.
“After all,” she said, “you didn't tell me whether you liked it.”
“No. I didn't need to.”
“No, that's true, and I didn't need to ask. I knew. But you said you were trying to keep from telling me what it did mean.”
“I can't keep from telling it any longer,” he said. “The music meant to me—it meant the kindness of—of you.”
“Kindness? How?”
“You thought I was a sort of lonely tramp—and sick—”
“No,” she said, decidedly. “I thought perhaps you'd like to hear Dr. Kraft play. And you did.”
“It's curious; sometimes it seemed to me that it was you who were playing.”
Mary laughed. “I? I strum! Piano. A little Chopin—Grieg—Chaminade. You wouldn't listen!”
Bibbs drew a deep breath. “I'm frightened again,” he said, in an unsteady voice. “I'm afraid you'll think I'm pushing, but—” He paused, and the words sank to a murmur.
“Oh, if you want ME to play for you!” she said. “Yes, gladly. It will be merely absurd after what you heard this afternoon. I play like a hundred thousand other girls, and I like it. I'm glad when any one's willing to listen, and if you—” She stopped, checked by a sudden recollection, and laughed ruefully. “But my piano won't be here after to-night. I—I'm sending it away to-morrow. I'm afraid that if you'd like me to play to you you'd have to come this evening.”
“You'll let me?” he cried.
“Certainly, if you care to.”
“If I could play—” he said, wistfully, “if I could play like that old man in the church I could thank you.”
“Ah, but you haven't heard me play. I KNOW you liked this afternoon, but—”
“Yes,” said Bibbs. “It was the greatest happiness I've ever known.”
It was too dark to see his face, but his voice held such plain honesty, and he spoke with such complete unconsciousness of saying anything especially significant, that she knew it was the truth. For a moment she was nonplussed, then she opened the gate and went in. “You'll come after dinner, then?”
“Yes,” he said, not moving. “Would you mind if I stood here until time to come in?”
She had reached the steps, and at that she turned, offering him the response of laughter and a gay gesture of her muff toward the lighted windows of the New House, as though bidding him to run home to his dinner.
That night, Bibbs sat writing in his note-book.
Music can come into a blank life, and fill it. Everything that is beautiful is music, if you can listen.
There is no gracefulness like that of a graceful woman at a grand piano. There is a swimming loveliness of line that seems to merge with the running of the sound, and you seem, as you watch her, to see what you are hearing and to hear what you are seeing.
There are women who make you think of pine woods coming down to a sparkling sea. The air about such a woman is bracing, and when she is near you, you feel strong and ambitious; you forget that the world doesn't like you. You think that perhaps you are a great fellow, after all. Then you come away and feel like a boy who has fallen in love with his Sunday-school teacher. You'll be whipped for it—and ought to be.
There are women who make you think of Diana, crowned with the moon. But they do not have the “Greek profile.” I do not believe Helen of Troy had a “Greek profile”; they would not have fought about her if her nose had been quite that long. The Greek nose is not the adorable nose. The adorable nose is about an eighth of an inch shorter.
Much of the music of Wagner, it appears, is not suitable to the piano. Wagner was a composer who could interpret into music such things as the primitive impulses of humanity—he could have made a machine-shop into music. But not if he had to work in it. Wagner was always dealing in immensities—a machine-shop would have put a majestic lump in so grand a gizzard as that.
There is a mystery about pianos, it seems. Sometimes they have to be “sent away.” That is how some people speak of the penitentiary. “Sent away” is a euphuism for “sent to prison.” But pianos are not sent to prison, and they are not sent to the tuner—the tuner is sent to them. Why are pianos “sent away”—and where?
Sometimes a glorious day shines into the most ordinary and useless life. Happiness and beauty come caroling out of the air into the gloomy house of that life as if some stray angel just happened to perch on the roof-tree, resting and singing. And the night after such a day is lustrous and splendid with the memory of it. Music and beauty and kindness—those are the three greatest things God can give us. To bring them all in one day to one who expected nothing—ah! the heart that received them should be as humble as it is thankful. But it is hard to be humble when one is so rich with new memories. It is impossible to be humble after a day of glory.
Yes—the adorable nose is more than an eighth of an inch shorter than the Greek nose. It is a full quarter of an inch shorter.
There are women who will be kinder to a sick tramp than to a conquering hero. But the sick tramp had better remember that's what he is. Take care, take care! Humble's the word!
CHAPTER XVII
That “mystery about pianos” which troubled Bibbs had been a mystery to Mr. Vertrees, and it was being explained to him at about the time Bibbs scribbled the reference to it in his notes. Mary had gone up-stairs upon Bibbs's departure at ten o'clock, and Mr. and Mrs. Vertrees sat until after midnight in the library, talking. And in all that time they found not one cheerful topic, but became more depressed with everything and with every phase of everything that they discussed—no extraordinary state of affairs in a family which has always “held up its head,” only to arrive in the end at a point where all it can do is to look on helplessly at the processes of its own financial dissolution. For that was the point which this despairing couple had reached—they could do nothing except look on and talk about it. They were only vaporing, and they knew it.
“She needn't to have done that about her piano,” vapored Mr. Vertrees. “We could have managed somehow without it. At least she ought to have consulted me, and if she insisted I could have arranged the details with the—the dealer.”
“She thought that it might be—annoying for you,” Mrs. Vertrees explained. “Really, she planned for you not to know about it until they had removed—until after to-morrow, that is, but I decided to—to mention it. You see, she didn't even tell me about it until this morning. She has another idea, too, I'm afraid. It's—it's—”
“Well?” he urged, as she found it difficult to go on.
“Her other idea is—that is, it was—I think it can be avoided, of course—it was about her furs.”
“No!” he exclaimed, quickly. “I won't have it! You must see to that. I'd rather not talk to her about it, but you mustn't let her.”
“I'll try not,” his wife promised. “Of course, they're very handsome.”
“All the more reason for her to keep them!” he returned, irritably. “We're not THAT far gone, I think!”
“Perhaps not yet,” Mrs. Vertrees said. “She seems to be troubled about the—the coal matter and—about Tilly. Of course the piano will take care of some things like those for a while and—”
“I don't like it. I gave her the piano to play on, not to—”
“You mustn't be distressed about it in ONE way,” she said, comfortingly. “She arranged with the—with the purchaser that the men will come for it about half after five in the afternoon. The days are so short now it's really quite winter.”
“Oh, yes,” he agreed, moodily. “So far as that goes people have a right to move a piece of furniture without stirring up the neighbors, I suppose, even by daylight. I don't suppose OUR neighbors are paying much attention just now, though I hear Sheridan was back in his office early the morning after the funeral.”
Mrs. Vertrees made a little sound of commiseration. “I don't believe that was because he wasn't suffering, though. I'm sure it was only because he felt his business was so important. Mary told me he seemed wrapped up in his son's succeeding; and that was what he bragged about most. He isn't vulgar in his boasting, I understand; he doesn't talk a great deal about his—his actual money—though there was something about blades of grass that I didn't comprehend. I think he meant something about his energy—but perhaps not. No, his bragging usually seemed to be not so much a personal vainglory as about his family and the greatness of this city.”
“'Greatness of this city'!” Mr. Vertrees echoed, with dull bitterness. “It's nothing but a coal-hole! I suppose it looks 'great' to the man who has the luck to make it work for him. I suppose it looks 'great' to any YOUNG man, too, starting out to make his fortune out of it. The fellows that get what they want out of it say it's 'great,' and everybody else gets the habit. But you have a different point of view if it's the city that got what it wanted out of you! Of course Sheridan says it's 'great'.”
Mrs. Vertrees seemed unaware of this unusual outburst. “I believe,” she began, timidly, “he doesn't boast of—that is, I understand he has never seemed so interested in the—the other one.”
Her husband's face was dark, but at that a heavier shadow fell upon it; he looked more haggard than before. “'The other one',” he repeated, averting his eyes. “You mean—you mean the third son—the one that was here this evening?”
“Yes, the—the youngest,” she returned, her voice so feeble it was almost a whisper.
And then neither of them spoke for several long minutes. Nor did either look at the other during that silence.
At last Mr. Vertrees contrived to cough, but not convincingly. “What—ah—what was it Mary said about him out in the hall, when she came in this afternoon? I heard you asking her something about him, but she answered in such a low voice I didn't—ah—happen to catch it.”
“She—she didn't say much. All she said was this: I asked her if she had enjoyed her walk with him, and she said, 'He's the most wistful creature I've ever known.'”
“Well?”
“That was all. He IS wistful-looking; and so fragile—though he doesn't seem quite so much so lately. I was watching Mary from the window when she went out to-day, and he joined her, and if I hadn't known about him I'd have thought he had quite an interesting face.”
“If you 'hadn't known about him'? Known what?”
“Oh, nothing, of course,” she said, hurriedly. “Nothing definite, that is. Mary said decidely, long ago, that he's not at all insane, as we thought at first. It's only—well, of course it IS odd, their attitude about him. I suppose it's some nervous trouble that makes him—perhaps a little queer at times, so that he can't apply himself to anything—or perhaps does odd things. But, after all, of course, we only have an impression about it. We don't know—that is, positively. I—” She paused, then went on: “I didn't know just how to ask—that is—I didn't mention it to Mary. I didn't—I—” The poor lady floundered pitifully, concluding with a mumble. “So soon after—after the—the shock.”
“I don't think I've caught more than a glimpse of him,” said Mr. Vertrees. “I wouldn't know him if I saw him, but your impression of him is—” He broke off suddenly, springing to his feet in agitation. “I can't imagine her—oh, NO!” he gasped. And he began to pace the floor. “A half-witted epileptic!”
“No, no!” she cried. “He may be all right. We—”
“Oh, it's horrible! I can't—” He threw himself back into his chair again, sweeping his hands across his face, then letting them fall limply at his sides.
Mrs. Vertrees was tremulous. “You mustn't give way so,” she said, inspired for once almost to direct discourse. “Whatever Mary might think of doing, it wouldn't be on her own account; it would be on ours. But if WE should—should consider it, that wouldn't be on OUR own account. It isn't because we think of ourselves.”
“Oh God, no!” he groaned. “Not for us! We can go to the poorhouse, but Mary can't be a stenographer!”
Sighing, Mrs. Vertrees resumed her obliqueness. “Of course,” she murmured, “it all seems very premature, speculating about such things, but I had a queer sort of feeling that she seemed quite interested in this—” She had almost said “in this one,” but checked herself. “In this young man. It's natural, of course; she is always so strong and well, and he is—he seems to be, that is—rather appealing to the—the sympathies.”
“Yes!” he agreed, bitterly. “Precisely. The sympathies!”
“Perhaps,” she faltered, “perhaps you might feel easier if I could have a little talk with some one?”
“With whom?”
“I had thought of—not going about it too brusquely, of course, but perhaps just waiting for his name to be mentioned, if I happened to be talking with somebody that knew the family—and then I might find a chance to say that I was sorry to hear he'd been ill so much, and—Something of that kind perhaps?”
“You don't know anybody that knows the family.”
“Yes. That is—well, in a way, of course, one OF the family. That Mrs. Roscoe Sheridan is not a—that is, she's rather a pleasant-faced little woman, I think, and of course rather ordinary. I think she is interested about—that is, of course, she'd be anxious to be more intimate with Mary, naturally. She's always looking over here from her house; she was looking out the window this afternoon when Mary went out, I noticed—though I don't think Mary saw her. I'm sure she wouldn't think it out of place to—to be frank about matters. She called the other day, and Mary must rather like her—she said that evening that the call had done her good. Don't you think it might be wise?”
“Wise? I don't know. I feel the whole matter is impossible.”