There seems to be another curious thing about Love [Bibbs wrote]. Love is blind while it lives and only opens its eyes and becomes very wide awake when it dies. Let it alone until then.You cannot reason with love or with any other passion. The wise will not wish for love—nor for ambition. These are passions and bring others in their train—hatreds and jealousies—all blind. Friendship and a quiet heart for the wise.What a turbulence is love! It is dangerous for a blind thing to be turbulent; there are precipices in life. One would not cross a mountain-pass with a thick cloth over his eyes. Lovers do. Friendship walks gently and with open eyes.To walk to church with a friend! To sit beside her there! To rise when she rises, and to touch with one's thumb and fingers the other half of the hymn-book that she holds! What lover, with his fierce ways, could know this transcendent happiness?Friendship brings everything that heaven could bring. There is no labor that cannot become a living rapture if you know that a friend is thinking of you as you labor. So you sing at your work. For the work is part of the thoughts of your friend; so you love it!Love is demanding and claiming and insistent. Friendship is all kindness—it makes the world glorious with kindness. What color you see when you walk with a friend! You see that the gray sky is brilliant and shimmering; you see that the smoke has warm browns and is marvelously sculptured—the air becomes iridescent. You see the gold in brown hair. Light floods everything.When you walk to church with a friend you know that life can give you nothing richer. You pray that there will be no change in anything for ever.What an adorable thing it is to discover a little foible in your friend, a bit of vanity that gives you one thing more about her to adore! On a cold morning she will perhaps walk to church with you without her furs, and she will blush and return an evasive answer when you ask her why she does not wear them. You will say no more, because you understand. She looks beautiful in her furs; you love their darkness against her cheek; but you comprehend that they conceal the loveliness of her throat and the fine line of her chin, and that she also has comprehended this, and, wishing to look still more bewitching, discards her furs at the risk of taking cold. So you hold your peace, and try to look as if you had not thought it out.This theory is satisfactory except that it does not account for the absence of the muff. Ah, well, there must always be a mystery somewhere! Mystery is a part of enchantment.Manual labor is best. Your heart can sing and your mind can dream while your hands are working. You could not have a singing heart and a dreaming mind all day if you had to scheme out dollars, or if you had to add columns of figures. Those things take your attention. You cannot be thinking of your friend while you write letters beginning “Yours of the 17th inst. rec'd and contents duly noted.” But to work with your hands all day, thinking and singing, and then, after nightfall, to hear the ineffable kindness of your friend's greeting—always there—for you! Who would wake from such a dream as this?Dawn and the sea—music in moonlit gardens—nightingales serenading through almond-groves in bloom—what could bring such things into the city's turmoil? Yet they are here, and roses blossom in the soot. That is whatit means not to be alone! That is what a friend gives you!
There seems to be another curious thing about Love [Bibbs wrote]. Love is blind while it lives and only opens its eyes and becomes very wide awake when it dies. Let it alone until then.
You cannot reason with love or with any other passion. The wise will not wish for love—nor for ambition. These are passions and bring others in their train—hatreds and jealousies—all blind. Friendship and a quiet heart for the wise.
What a turbulence is love! It is dangerous for a blind thing to be turbulent; there are precipices in life. One would not cross a mountain-pass with a thick cloth over his eyes. Lovers do. Friendship walks gently and with open eyes.
To walk to church with a friend! To sit beside her there! To rise when she rises, and to touch with one's thumb and fingers the other half of the hymn-book that she holds! What lover, with his fierce ways, could know this transcendent happiness?
Friendship brings everything that heaven could bring. There is no labor that cannot become a living rapture if you know that a friend is thinking of you as you labor. So you sing at your work. For the work is part of the thoughts of your friend; so you love it!
Love is demanding and claiming and insistent. Friendship is all kindness—it makes the world glorious with kindness. What color you see when you walk with a friend! You see that the gray sky is brilliant and shimmering; you see that the smoke has warm browns and is marvelously sculptured—the air becomes iridescent. You see the gold in brown hair. Light floods everything.
When you walk to church with a friend you know that life can give you nothing richer. You pray that there will be no change in anything for ever.
What an adorable thing it is to discover a little foible in your friend, a bit of vanity that gives you one thing more about her to adore! On a cold morning she will perhaps walk to church with you without her furs, and she will blush and return an evasive answer when you ask her why she does not wear them. You will say no more, because you understand. She looks beautiful in her furs; you love their darkness against her cheek; but you comprehend that they conceal the loveliness of her throat and the fine line of her chin, and that she also has comprehended this, and, wishing to look still more bewitching, discards her furs at the risk of taking cold. So you hold your peace, and try to look as if you had not thought it out.
This theory is satisfactory except that it does not account for the absence of the muff. Ah, well, there must always be a mystery somewhere! Mystery is a part of enchantment.
Manual labor is best. Your heart can sing and your mind can dream while your hands are working. You could not have a singing heart and a dreaming mind all day if you had to scheme out dollars, or if you had to add columns of figures. Those things take your attention. You cannot be thinking of your friend while you write letters beginning “Yours of the 17th inst. rec'd and contents duly noted.” But to work with your hands all day, thinking and singing, and then, after nightfall, to hear the ineffable kindness of your friend's greeting—always there—for you! Who would wake from such a dream as this?
Dawn and the sea—music in moonlit gardens—nightingales serenading through almond-groves in bloom—what could bring such things into the city's turmoil? Yet they are here, and roses blossom in the soot. That is what
Having thus demonstrated that he was about twenty-five and had formed a somewhat indefinite definition of friendship, but one entirely his own (and perhaps Mary's) Bibbs went to bed, and was the only Sheridan to sleep soundly through the night and to wake at dawn with a light heart.
His cheerfulness was vaguely diminished by the troublous state of affairs of his family. He had recognized his condition when he wrote, “Who would wake from such a dream as this?” Bibbs was a sympathetic person, easily touched, but he was indeed living in a dream, and all things outside of it were veiled and remote—for that is the way of youth in a dream. And Bibbs, who had never before been of any age, either old or young, had come to his youth at last.
He went whistling from the house before even his father had come down-stairs. There was a fog outdoors, saturated with a fine powder of soot, and though Bibbs noticed absently the dim shape of an automobile at the curb before Roscoe's house, he did not recognize it as Dr. Gurney's, but went cheerily on his way through the dingy mist. And when he was once more installed beside his faithful zinc-eater he whistled and sang to it, as other workmen did to their own machines sometimes, when things went well. His comrades in the shop glanced at him amusedly now and then. They liked him, and he ate his lunch at noon with a group of Socialists who approved of his ideas and talked of electing him to their association.
The short days of the year had come, and it was dark before the whistles blew. When the signal came, Bibbs went to the office, where he divested himself of his overalls—his single divergence from the routine of his fellow-workmen—and after that he used soap and water copiously. This was his transformation scene: he passed into the office a rather frail young working-man noticeably begrimed, and passed out of it to the pavement a cheerfully pre-occupied sample of gentry, fastidious to the point of elegance.
The sidewalk was crowded with the bearers of dinner-pails, men and boys and women and girls from the work-rooms that closed at five. Many hurried and some loitered; they went both east and west, jostling one another, and Bibbs, turning his face homeward, was forced to go slowly.
Coming toward him, as slowly, through the crowd, a tall girl caught sight of his long, thin figure and stood still until he had almost passed her, for in the thick crowd and the thicker gloom he did not recognize her, though his shoulder actually touched hers. He would have gone by, but she laughed delightedly; and he stopped short, startled. Two boys, one chasing the other, swept between them, and Bibbs stood still, peering about him in deep perplexity. She leaned toward him.
“I knew YOU!” she said.
“Good heavens!” cried Bibbs. “I thought it was your voice coming out of a star!”
“There's only smoke overhead,” said Mary, and laughed again. “There aren't any stars.”
“Oh yes, there were—when you laughed!”
She took his arm, and they went on. “I've come to walk home with you, Bibbs. I wanted to.”
“But were you here in the—”
“In the dark? Yes! Waiting? Yes!”
Bibbs was radiant; he felt suffocated with happiness. He began to scold her.
“But it's not safe, and I'm not worth it. You shouldn't have—you ought to know better. What did—”
“I only waited about twelve seconds,” she laughed. “I'd just got here.”
“But to come all this way and to this part of town in the dark, you—”
“I was in this part of town already,” she said. “At least, I was only seven or eight blocks away, and it was dark when I came out, and I'd have had to go home alone—and I preferred going home with you.”
“It's pretty beautiful for me,” said Bibbs, with a deep breath. “You'll never know what it was to hear your laugh in the darkness—and then to—to see you standing there! Oh, it was like—it was like—how can I TELL you what it was like?” They had passed beyond the crowd now, and a crossing-lamp shone upon them, which revealed the fact that again she was without her furs. Here was a puzzle. Why did that adorable little vanity of hers bring her out without them in the DARK? But of course she had gone out long before dark. For undefinable reasons this explanation was not quite satisfactory; however, allowing it to stand, his solicitude for her took another turn. “I think you ought to have a car,” he said, “especially when you want to be out after dark. You need one in winter, anyhow. Have you ever asked your father for one?”
“No,” said Mary. “I don't think I'd care for one particularly.”
“I wish you would.” Bibbs's tone was earnest and troubled. “I think in winter you—”
“No, no,” she interrupted, lightly. “I don't need—”
“But my mother tried to insist on sending one over here every afternoon for me. I wouldn't let her, because I like the walk, but a girl—”
“A girl likes to walk, too,” said Mary. “Let me tell you where I've been this afternoon and how I happened to be near enough to make you take me home. I've been to see a little old man who makes pictures of the smoke. He has a sort of warehouse for a studio, and he lives there with his mother and his wife and their seven children, and he's gloriously happy. I'd seen one of his pictures at an exhibition, and I wanted to see more of them, so he showed them to me. He has almost everthing he ever painted; I don't suppose he's sold more than four or five pictures in his life. He gives drawing-lessons to keep alive.”
“How do you mean he paints the smoke?” Bibbs asked.
“Literally. He paints from his studio window and from the street—anywhere. He just paints what's around him—and it's beautiful.”
“The smoke?”
“Wonderful! He sees the sky through it, somehow. He does the ugly roofs of cheap houses through a haze of smoke, and he does smoky sunsets and smoky sunrises, and he has other things with the heavy, solid, slow columns of smoke going far out and growing more ethereal and mixing with the hazy light in the distance; and he has others with the broken sky-line of down-town, all misted with the smoke and puffs and jets of vapor that have colors like an orchard in mid-April. I'm going to take you there some Sunday afternoon, Bibbs.”
“You're showing me the town,” he said. “I didn't know what was in it at all.”
“There are workers in beauty here,” she told him, gently. “There are other painters more prosperous than my friend. There are all sorts of things.”
“I didn't know.”
“No. Since the town began growing so great that it called itself 'greater,' one could live here all one's life and know only the side of it that shows.”
“The beauty-workers seem buried very deep,” said Bibbs. “And I imagine that your friend who makes the smoke beautiful must be buried deepest of all. My father loves the smoke, but I can't imagine his buying one of your friend's pictures. He'd buy the 'Bay of Naples,' but he wouldn't get one of those. He'd think smoke in a picture was horrible—unless he could use it for an advertisement.”
“Yes,” she said, thoughtfully. “And really he's the town. They ARE buried pretty deep, it seems, sometimes, Bibbs.”
“And yet it's all wonderful,” he said. “It's wonderful to me.”
“You mean the town is wonderful to you?”
“Yes, because everything is, since you called me your friend. The city is only a rumble on the horizon for me. It can't come any closer than the horizon so long as you let me see you standing by my old zinc-eater all day long, helping me. Mary—” He stopped with a gasp. “That's the first time I've called you 'Mary'!”
“Yes.” She laughed, a little tremuously. “Though I wanted you to!”
“I said it without thinking. It must be because you came there to walk home with me. That must be it.”
“Women like to have things said,” Mary informed him, her tremulous laughter continuing. “Were you glad I came for you?”
“No—not 'glad.' I felt as if I were being carried straight up and up and up—over the clouds. I feel like that still. I think I'm that way most of the time. I wonder what I was like before I knew you. The person I was then seems to have been somebody else, not Bibbs Sheridan at all. It seems long, long ago. I was gloomy and sickly—somebody else—somebody I don't understand now, a coward afraid of shadows—afraid of things that didn't exist—afraid of my old zinc-eater! And now I'm only afraid of what might change anything.”
She was silent a moment, and then, “You're happy, Bibbs?” she asked.
“Ah, don't you see?” he cried. “I want it to last for a thousand, thousand years, just as it is! You've made me so rich, I'm a miser. I wouldn't have one thing different—nothing, nothing!”
“Dear Bibbs!” she said, and laughed happily.
Bibbs continued to live in the shelter of his dream. He had told Edith, after his ineffective effort to be useful in her affairs, that he had decided that he was “a member of the family”; but he appeared to have relapsed to the retired list after that one attempt at participancy—he was far enough detached from membership now. These were turbulent days in the New House, but Bibbs had no part whatever in the turbulence—he seemed an absent-minded stranger, present by accident and not wholly aware that he was present. He would sit, faintly smiling over pleasant imaginings and dear reminiscences of his own, while battle raged between Edith and her father, or while Sheridan unloosed jeremiads upon the sullen Roscoe, who drank heavily to endure them. The happy dreamer wandered into storm-areas like a somnambulist, and wandered out again unawakened. He was sorry for his father and for Roscoe, and for Edith and for Sibyl, but their sufferings and outcries seemed far away.
Sibyl was under Gurney's care. Roscoe had sent for him on Sunday night, not long after Bibbs returned the abandoned wraps; and during the first days of Sibyl's illness the doctor found it necessary to be with her frequently, and to install a muscular nurse. And whether he would or no, Gurney received from his hysterical patient a variety of pungent information which would have staggered anybody but a family physician. Among other things he was given to comprehend the change in Bibbs, and why the zinc-eater was not putting a lump in the operator's gizzard as of yore.
Sibyl was not delirious—she was a thin little ego writhing and shrieking in pain. Life had hurt her, and had driven her into hurting herself; her condition was only the adult's terrible exaggeration of that of a child after a bad bruise—there must be screaming and telling mother all about the hurt and how it happened. Sibyl babbled herself hoarse when Gurney withheld morphine. She went from the beginning to the end in a breath. No protest stopped her; nothing stopped her.
“You ought to let me die!” she wailed. “It's cruel not to let me die! What harm have I ever done to anybody that you want to keep me alive? Just look at my life! I only married Roscoe to get away from home, and look what that got me into!—look where I am now! He brought me to this town, and what did I have in my life but his FAMILY? And they didn't even know the right crowd! If they had, it might have been SOMETHING! I had nothing—nothing—nothing in the world! I wanted to have a good time—and how could I? Where's any good time among these Sheridans? They never even had wine on the table! I thought I was marrying into a rich family where I'd meet attractive people I'd read about, and travel, and go to dances—and, oh, my Lord! all I got was these Sheridans! I did the best I could; I did, indeed! Oh, I DID! I just tried to live. Every woman's got a right to live, some time in her life, I guess! Things were just beginning to look brighter—we'd moved up here, and that frozen crowd across the street were after Jim for their daughter, and they'd have started us with the right people—and then I saw how Edith was getting him away from me. She did it, too! She got him! A girl with money can do that to a married woman—yes, she can, every time! And what could I do? What can any woman do in my fix? I couldn't do ANYTHING but try to stand it—and I couldn't stand it! I went to that icicle—that Vertrees girl—and she could have helped me a little, and it wouldn't have hurt her. It wouldn't have done her any harm to help me THAT little! She treated me as if I'd been dirt that she wouldn't even take the trouble to sweep out of her house! Let her WAIT!”
Sibyl's voice, hoarse from babbling, became no more than a husky whisper, though she strove to make it louder. She struggled half upright, and the nurse restrained her. “I'd get up out of this bed to show her she can't do such things to me! I was absolutely ladylike, and she walked out and left me there alone! She'll SEE! She started after Bibbs before Jim's casket was fairly underground, and she thinks she's landed that poor loon—but she'll see! She'll see! If I'm ever able to walk across the street again I'll show her how to treat a woman in trouble that comes to her for help! It wouldn't have hurt her any—it wouldn't—it wouldn't. And Edith needn't have told what she told Roscoe—it wouldn't have hurt her to let me alone. And HE told her I bored him—telephoning him I wanted to see him. He needn't have done it! He needn't—needn't—” Her voice grew fainter, for that while, with exhaustion, though she would go over it all again as soon as her strength returned. She lay panting. Then, seeing her husband standing disheveled in the doorway, “Don't come in, Roscoe,” she murmured. “I don't want to see you.” And as he turned away she added, “I'm kind of sorry for you, Roscoe.”
Her antagonist, Edith, was not more coherent in her own wailings, and she had the advantage of a mother for listener. She had also the disadvantage of a mother for duenna, and Mrs. Sheridan, under her husband's sharp tutelage, proved an effective one. Edith was reduced to telephoning Lamhorn from shops whenever she could juggle her mother into a momentary distraction over a counter.
Edith was incomparably more in love than before Lamhorn's expulsion. Her whole being was nothing but the determination to hurdle everything that separated her from him. She was in a state that could be altered by only the lightest and most delicate diplomacy of suggestion, but Sheridan, like legions of other parents, intensified her passion and fed it hourly fuel by opposing to it an intolerable force. He swore she should cool, and thus set her on fire.
Edith planned neatly. She fought hard, every other evening, with her father, and kept her bed betweentimes to let him see what his violence had done to her. Then, when the mere sight of her set him to breathing fast, she said pitiably that she might bear her trouble better if she went away; it was impossible to be in the same town with Lamhorn and not think always of him. Perhaps in New York she might forget a little. She had written to a school friend, established quietly with an aunt in apartments—and a month or so of theaters and restaurants might bring peace. Sheridan shouted with relief; he gave her a copious cheque, and she left upon a Monday morning wearing violets with her mourning and having kissed everybody good-by except Sibyl and Bibbs. She might have kissed Bibbs, but he failed to realize that the day of her departure had arrived, and was surprised, on returning from his zinc-eater, that evening, to find her gone. “I suppose they'll be maried there,” he said, casually.
Sheridan, seated, warming his stockinged feet at the fire, jumped up, fuming. “Either you go out o' here, or I will, Bibbs!” he snorted. “I don't want to be in the same room with the particular kind of idiot you are! She's through with that riff-raff; all she needed was to be kept away from him a few weeks, and I KEPT her away, and it did the business. For Heaven's sake, go on out o' here!”
Bibbs obeyed the gesture of a hand still bandaged. And the black silk sling was still round Sheridan's neck, but no word of Gurney's and no excruciating twinge of pain could keep Sheridan's hand in the sling. The wounds, slight enough originally, had become infected the first time he had dislodged the bandages, and healing was long delayed. Sheridan had the habit of gesture; he could not “take time to remember,” he said, that he must be careful, and he had also a curious indignation with his hurt; he refused to pay it the compliment of admitting its existence.
The Saturday following Edith's departure Gurney came to the Sheridan Building to dress the wounds and to have a talk with Sheridan which the doctor felt had become necessary. But he was a little before the appointed time and was obliged to wait a few minutes in an anteroom—there was a directors' meeting of some sort in Sheridan's office. The door was slightly ajar, leaking cigar-smoke and oratory, the latter all Sheridan's, and Gurney listened.
“No, sir; no, sir; no, sir!” he heard the big voice rumbling, and then, breaking into thunder, “I tell you NO! Some o' you men make me sick! You'd lose your confidence in Almighty God if a doodle-bug flipped his hind leg at you! You say money's tight all over the country. Well, what if it is? There's no reason for it to be tight, and it's not goin' to keep OUR money tight! You're always runnin' to the woodshed to hide your nickels in a crack because some fool newspaper says the market's a little skeery! You listen to every street-corner croaker and then come and set here and try to scare ME out of a big thing! We're IN on this—understand? I tell you there never WAS better times. These are good times and big times, and I won't stand for any other kind o' talk. This country's on its feet as it never was before, and this city's on its feet and goin' to stay there!” And Gurney heard a series of whacks and thumps upon the desk. “'Bad times'!” Sheridan vociferated, with accompanying thumps. “Rabbit talk! These times are glorious, I tell you! We're in the promised land, and we're goin' to STAY there! That's all, gentlemen. The loan goes!”
The directors came forth, flushed and murmurous, and Gurney hastened in. His guess was correct: Sheridan had been thumping the desk with his right hand. The physician scolded wearily, making good the fresh damage as best he might; and then he said what he had to say on the subject of Roscoe and Sibyl, his opinion meeting, as he expected, a warmly hostile reception. But the result of this conversation was that by telephonic command Roscoe awaited his father, an hour later, in the library at the New House.
“Gurney says your wife's able to travel,” Sheridan said brusquely, as he came in.
“Yes.” Roscoe occupied a deep chair and sat in the dejected attitude which had become his habit. “Yes, she is.”
“Edith had to leave town, and so Sibyl thinks she'll have to, too!”
“Oh, I wouldn't put it that way,” Roscoe protested, drearily.
“No, I hear YOU wouldn't!” There was a bitter gibe in the father's voice, and he added: “It's a good thing she's goin' abroad—if she'll stay there. I shouldn't think any of us want her here any more—you least of all!”
“It's no use your talking that way,” said Roscoe. “You won't do any good.”
“Well, when are you comin' back to your office?” Sheridan used a brisker, kinder tone. “Three weeks since you showed up there at all. When you goin' to be ready to cut out whiskey and all the rest o' the foolishness and start in again? You ought to be able to make up for a lot o' lost time and a lot o' spilt milk when that woman takes herself out o' the way and lets you and all the rest of us alone.”
“It's no use, father, I tell you. I know what Gurney was going to say to you. I'm not going back to the office. I'm DONE!”
“Wait a minute before you talk that way!” Sheridan began his sentry-go up and down the room. “I suppose you know it's taken two pretty good men about sixteen hours a day to set things straight and get 'em runnin' right again, down in your office?”
“They must be good men.” Roscoe nodded indifferently. “I thought I was doing about eight men's work. I'm glad you found two that could handle it.”
“Look here! If I worked you it was for your own good. There are plenty men drive harder'n I do, and—”
“Yes. There are some that break down all the other men that work with 'em. They either die, or go crazy, or have to quit, and are no use the rest of their lives. The last's my case, I guess—'complicated by domestic difficulties'!”
“You set there and tell me you give up?” Sheridan's voice shook, and so did the gesticulating hand which he extended appealingly toward the despondent figure. “Don't do it, Roscoe! Don't say it! Say you'll come down there again and be a man! This woman ain't goin' to trouble you any more. The work ain't goin' to hurt you if you haven't got her to worry you, and you can get shut o' this nasty whiskey-guzzlin'; it ain't fastened on you yet. Don't say—”
“It's no use on earth,” Roscoe mumbled. “No use on earth.”
“Look here! If you want another month's vacation—”
“I know Gurney told you, so what's the use talking about 'vacations'?”
“Gurney!” Sheridan vociferated the name savagely. “It's Gurney, Gurney, Gurney! Always Gurney! I don't know what the world's comin' to with everybody runnin' around squealin', 'The doctor says this,' and, 'The doctor says that'! It makes me sick! How's this country expect to get its Work done if Gurney and all the other old nanny-goats keep up this blattin'—'Oh, oh! Don't lift that stick o' wood; you'll ruin your NERVES!' So he says you got 'nervous exhaustion induced by overwork and emotional strain.' They always got to stick the Work in if they see a chance! I reckon you did have the 'emotional strain,' and that's all's the matter with you. You'll be over it soon's this woman's gone, and Work's the very thing to make you quit frettin' about her.”
“Did Gurney tell you I was fit to work?”
“Shut up!” Sheridan bellowed. “I'm so sick o' that man's name I feel like shootin' anybody that says it to me!” He fumed and chafed, swearing indistinctly, then came and stood before his son. “Look here; do you think you're doin' the square thing by me? Do you? How much you worth?”
“I've got between seven and eight thousand a year clear, of my own, outside the salary. That much is mine whether I work or not.”
“It is? You could'a pulled it out without me, I suppose you think, at your age?”
“No. But it's mine, and it's enough.”
“My Lord! It's about what a Congressman gets, and you want to quit there! I suppose you think you'll get the rest when I kick the bucket, and all you have to do is lay back and wait! You let me tell you right here, you'll never see one cent of it. You go out o' business now, and what would you know about handlin' it five or ten or twenty years from now? Because I intend to STAY here a little while yet, my boy! They'd either get it away from you or you'd sell for a nickel and let it be split up and—” He whirled about, marched to the other end of the room, and stood silent a moment. Then he said, solemnly: “Listen. If you go out now, you leave me in the lurch, with nothin' on God's green earth to depend on but your brother—and you know what he is. I've depended on you for it ALL since Jim died. Now you've listened to that dam' doctor, and he says maybe you won't ever be as good a man as you were, and that certainly you won't be for a year or so—probably more. Now, that's all a lie. Men don't break down that way at your age. Look at ME! And I tell you, you can shake this thing off. All you need is a little GET-up and a little gumption. Men don't go away for YEARS and then come back into MOVING businesses like ours—they lose the strings. And if you could, I won't let you—if you lay down on me now, I won't—and that's because if you lay down you prove you ain't the man I thought you were.” He cleared his throat and finished quietly: “Roscoe, will you take a month's vacation and come back and go to it?”
“No,” said Roscoe, listlessly. “I'm through.”
“All right,” said Sheridan. He picked up the evening paper from a table, went to a chair by the fire and sat down, his back to his son. “Good-by.”
Roscoe rose, his head hanging, but there was a dull relief in his eyes. “Best I can do,” he muttered, seeming about to depart, yet lingering. “I figure it out a good deal like this,” he said. “I didn't KNOW my job was any strain, and I managed all right, but from what Gur—from what I hear, I was just up to the limit of my nerves from overwork, and the—the trouble at home was the extra strain that's fixed me the way I am. I tried to brace, so I could stand the work and the trouble too, on whiskey—and that put the finish to me! I—I'm not hitting it as hard as I was for a while, and I reckon pretty soon, if I can get to feeling a little more energy, I better try to quit entirely—I don't know. I'm all in—and the doctor says so. I thought I was running along fine up to a few months ago, but all the time I was ready to bust, and didn't know it. Now, then, I don't want you to blame Sibyl, and if I were you I wouldn't speak of her as 'that woman,' because she's your daughter-in-law and going to stay that way. She didn't do anything wicked. It was a shock to me, and I don't deny it, to find what she had done—encouraging that fellow to hang around her after he began trying to flirt with her, and losing her head over him the way she did. I don't deny it was a shock and that it'll always be a hurt inside of me I'll never get over. But it was my fault; I didn't understand a woman's nature.” Poor Roscoe spoke in the most profound and desolate earnest. “A woman craves society, and gaiety, and meeting attractive people, and traveling. Well, I can't give her the other things, but I can give her the traveling—real traveling, not just going to Atlantic City or New Orleans, the way she has, two, three times. A woman has to have something in her life besides a business man. And that's ALL I was. I never understood till I heard her talking when she was so sick, and I believe if you'd heard her then you wouldn't speak so hard-heartedly about her; I believe you might have forgiven her like I have. That's all. I never cared anything for any girl but her in my life, but I was so busy with business I put it ahead of her. I never THOUGHT about her, I was so busy thinking business. Well, this is where it's brought us to—and now when you talk about 'business' to me I feel the way you do when anybody talks about Gurney to you. The word 'business' makes me dizzy—it makes me honestly sick at the stomach. I believe if I had to go down-town and step inside that office door I'd fall down on the floor, deathly sick. You talk about a 'month's vacation'—and I get just as sick. I'm rattled—I can't plan—I haven't got any plans—can't make any, except to take my girl and get just as far away from that office as I can—and stay. We're going to Japan first, and if we—”
His father rustled the paper. “I said good-by, Roscoe.”
“Good-by,” said Roscoe, listlessly.
Sheridan waited until he heard the sound of the outer door closing; then he rose and pushed a tiny disk set in the wall. Jackson appeared.
“Has Bibbs got home from work?”
“Mist' Bibbs? No, suh.”
“Tell him I want to see him, soon as he comes.”
“Yessuh.”
Sheridan returned to his chair and fixed his attention fiercely upon the newspaper. He found it difficult to pursue the items beyond their explanatory rubrics—there was nothing unusual or startling to concentrate his attention:
“Motorman Puts Blame on Brakes. Three Killed when Car Slides.”“Burglars Make Big Haul.”“Board Works Approve Big Car-line Extension.”“Hold-up Men Injure Two. Man Found in Alley, Skull Fractured.”“Sickening Story Told in Divorce Court.”“Plan New Eighteen-story Structure.”“School-girl Meets Death under Automobile.”“Negro Cuts Three. One Dead.”“Life Crushed Out. Third Elevator Accident in Same Building Causes Action by Coroner.”“Declare Militia will be Menace. Polish Societies Protest to Governor in Church Rioting Case.”“Short $3,500 in Accounts, Trusted Man Kills Self with Drug.”“Found Frozen. Family Without Food or Fuel. Baby Dead when Parents Return Home from Seeking Work.”“Minister Returned from Trip Abroad Lectures on Big Future of OurCity. Sees Big Improvement during Short Absence. Says NoEuropean City Holds Candle.” (Sheridan nodded approvingly here.)
“Motorman Puts Blame on Brakes. Three Killed when Car Slides.”“Burglars Make Big Haul.”“Board Works Approve Big Car-line Extension.”“Hold-up Men Injure Two. Man Found in Alley, Skull Fractured.”“Sickening Story Told in Divorce Court.”“Plan New Eighteen-story Structure.”“School-girl Meets Death under Automobile.”“Negro Cuts Three. One Dead.”“Life Crushed Out. Third Elevator Accident in Same Building Causes Action by Coroner.”“Declare Militia will be Menace. Polish Societies Protest to Governor in Church Rioting Case.”“Short $3,500 in Accounts, Trusted Man Kills Self with Drug.”“Found Frozen. Family Without Food or Fuel. Baby Dead when Parents Return Home from Seeking Work.”“Minister Returned from Trip Abroad Lectures on Big Future of OurCity. Sees Big Improvement during Short Absence. Says NoEuropean City Holds Candle.” (Sheridan nodded approvingly here.)
Bibbs came through the hall whistling, and entered the room briskly. “Well, father, did you want me?”
“Yes. Sit down.” Sheridan got up, and Bibbs took a seat by the fire, holding out his hands to the crackling blaze, for it was cold outdoors.
“I came within seven of the shop record to-day,” he said. “I handled more strips than any other workman has any day this month. The nearest to me is sixteen behind.”
“There!” exclaimed his father, greatly pleased. “What'd I tell you? I'd like to hear Gurney hint again that I wasn't right in sending you there—I would just like to hear him! And you—ain't you ashamed of makin' such a fuss about it? Ain't you?”
“I didn't go at it in the right spirit the other time,” Bibbs said, smiling brightly, his face ruddy in the cheerful firelight. “I didn't know the difference it meant to like a thing.”
“Well, I guess I've pretty thoroughly vindicated my judgement. I guess I HAVE! I said the shop'd be good for you, and it was. I said it wouldn't hurt you, and it hasn't. It's been just exactly what I said it would be. Ain't that so?”
“Looks like it!” Bibbs agreed, gaily.
“Well, I'd like to know any place I been wrong, first and last! Instead o' hurting you, it's been the makin' of you—physically. You're a good inch taller'n what I am, and you'd be a bigger man than what I am if you'd get some flesh on your bones; and you ARE gettin' a little. Physically, it's started you out to be the huskiest one o' the whole family. Now, then, mentally—that's different. I don't say it unkindly, Bibbs, but you got to do something for yourself mentally, just like what's begun physically. And I'm goin' to help you.”
Sheridan decided to sit down again. He brought his chair close to his son's, and, leaning over, tapped Bibbs's knee confidentially. “I got plans for you, Bibbs,” he said.
Bibbs instantly looked thoroughly alarmed. He drew back. “I—I'm all right now, father.”
“Listen.” Sheridan settled himself in his chair, and spoke in the tone of a reasonable man reasoning. “Listen here, Bibbs. I had another blow to-day, and it was a hard one and right in the face, though I HAVE been expectin' it some little time back. Well, it's got to be met. Now I'll be frank with you. As I said a minute ago, mentally I couldn't ever called you exactly strong. You been a little weak both ways, most of your life. Not but what I think you GOT a mentality, if you'd learn to use it. You got will-power, I'll say that for you. I never knew boy or man that could be stubborner—never one in my life! Now, then, you've showed you could learn to run that machine best of any man in the shop, in no time at all. That looks to me like you could learn to do other things. I don't deny but what it's an encouragin' sign. I don't deny that, at all. Well, that helps me to think the case ain't so hopeless as it looks. You're all I got to meet this blow with, but maybe you ain't as poor material as I thought. Your tellin' me about comin' within seven strips of the shop's record to-day looks to me like encouragin' information brought in at just about the right time. Now, then, I'm goin' to give you a raise. I wanted to send you straight on up through the shops—a year or two, maybe—but I can't do it. I lost Jim, and now I've lost Roscoe. He's quit. He's laid down on me. If he ever comes back at all, he'll be a long time pickin' up the strings, and, anyway, he ain't the man I thought he was. I can't count on him. I got to have SOMEBODY I KNOW I can count on. And I'm down to this: you're my last chance. Bibbs, I got to learn you to use what brains you got and see if we can't develop 'em a little. Who knows? And I'm goin' to put my time in on it. I'm goin' to take you right down-town with ME, and I won't be hard on you if you're a little slow at first. And I'm goin' to do the big thing for you. I'm goin' to make you feel you got to do the big thing for me, in return. I've vindicated my policy with you about the shop, and now I'm goin' to turn right around and swing you 'way over ahead of where the other boys started, and I'm goin' to make an appeal to your ambition that'll make you dizzy!” He tapped his son on the knee again. “Bibbs, I'm goin' to start you off this way: I'm goin' to make you a director in the Pump Works Company; I'm goin' to make you vice-president of the Realty Company and a vice-president of the Trust Company!”
Bibbs jumped to his feet, blanched. “Oh no!” he cried.
Sheridan took his dismay to be the excitement of sudden joy. “Yes, sir! And there's some pretty fat little salaries goes with those vice-presidencies, and a pinch o' stock in the Pump Company with the directorship. You thought I was pretty mean about the shop—oh, I know you did!—but you see the old man can play it both ways. And so right now, the minute you've begun to make good the way I wanted you to, I deal from the new deck. And I'll keep on handin' it out bigger and bigger every time you show me you're big enough to play the hand I deal you. I'm startin' you with a pretty big one, my boy!”
“But I don't—I don't—I don't want it!” Bibbs stammered.
“What'd you say?” Sheridan thought he had not heard aright.
“I don't want it, father. I thank you—I do thank you—”
Sheridan looked perplexed. “What's the matter with you? Didn't you understand what I was tellin' you?”
“Yes.”
“You sure? I reckon you didn't. I offered—”
“I know, I know! But I can't take it.”
“What's the matter with you?” Sheridan was half amazed, half suspicious. “Your head feel funny?”
“I've never been quite so sane in my life,” said Bibbs, “as I have lately. And I've got just what I want. I'm living exactly the right life. I'm earning my daily bread, and I'm happy in doing it. My wages are enough. I don't want any more money, and I don't deserve any—”
“Damnation!” Sheridan sprang up. “You've turned Socialist! You been listening to those fellows down there, and you—”
“No, sir. I think there's a great deal in what they say, but that isn't it.”
Sheridan tried to restrain his growing fury, and succeeded partially. “Then what is it? What's the matter?”
“Nothing,” his son returned, nervously. “Nothing—except that I'm content. I don't want to change anything.”
“Why not?”
Bibbs had the incredible folly to try to explain. “I'll tell you, father, if I can. I know it may be hard to understand—”
“Yes, I think it may be,” said Sheridan, grimly. “What you say usually is a LITTLE that way. Go on!”
Perturbed and distressed, Bibbs rose instinctively; he felt himself at every possible disadvantage. He was a sleeper clinging to a dream—a rough hand stretched to shake him and waken him. He went to a table and made vague drawings upon it with a finger, and as he spoke he kept his eyes lowered. “You weren't altogether right about the shop—that is, in one way you weren't, father.” He glanced up apprehensively. Sheridan stood facing him, expressionless, and made no attempt to interrupt. “That's difficult to explain,” Bibbs continued, lowering his eyes again, to follow the tracings of his finger. “I—I believe the shop might have done for me this time if I hadn't—if something hadn't helped me to—oh, not only to bear it, but to be happy in it. Well, I AM happy in it. I want to go on just as I am. And of all things on earth that I don't want, I don't want to live a business life—I don't want to be drawn into it. I don't think it IS living—and now I AM living. I have the healthful toil—and I can think. In business as important as yours I couldn't think anything but business. I don't—I don't think making money is worth while.”
“Go on,” said Sheridan, curtly, as Bibbs paused timidly.
“It hasn't seemed to get anywhere, that I can see,” said Bibbs. “You think this city is rich and powerful—but what's the use of its being rich and powerful? They don't teach the children any more in the schools because the city is rich and powerful. They teach them more than they used to because some people—not rich and powerful people—have thought the thoughts to teach the children. And yet when you've been reading the paper I've heard you objecting to the children being taught anything except what would help them to make money. You said it was wasting the taxes. You want them taught to make a living, but not to live. When I was a little boy this wasn't an ugly town; now it's hideous. What's the use of being big just to be hideous? I mean I don't think all this has meant really going ahead—it's just been getting bigger and dirtier and noisier. Wasn't the whole country happier and in many ways wiser when it was smaller and cleaner and quieter and kinder? I know you think I'm an utter fool, father, but, after all, though, aren't business and politics just the housekeeping part of life? And wouldn't you despise a woman that not only made her housekeeping her ambition, but did it so noisily and dirtily that the whole neighborhood was in a continual turmoil over it? And suppose she talked and thought about her housekeeping all the time, and was always having additions built to her house when she couldn't keep clean what she already had; and suppose, with it all, she made the house altogether unpeaceful and unlivable—”
“Just one minute!” Sheridan interrupted, adding, with terrible courtesy, “If you will permit me? Have you ever been right about anything?”
“I don't quite—”
“I ask the simple question: Have you ever been right about anything whatever in the course of your life? Have you ever been right upon any subject or question you've thought about and talked about? Can you mention one single time when you were proved to be right?”
He was flourishing the bandaged hand as he spoke, but Bibbs said only, “If I've always been wrong before, surely there's more chance that I'm right about this. It seems reasonable to suppose something would be due to bring up my average.”
“Yes, I thought you wouldn't see the point. And there's another you probably couldn't see, but I'll take the liberty to mention it. You been balkin' all your life. Pretty much everything I ever wanted you to do, you'd let out SOME kind of a holler, like you are now—and yet I can't seem to remember once when you didn't have to lay down and do what I said. But go on with your remarks about our city and the business of this country. Go on!”
“I don't want to be a part of it,” said Bibbs, with unwonted decision. “I want to keep to myself, and I'm doing it now. I couldn't, if I went down there with you. I'd be swallowed into it. I don't care for money enough to—”
“No,” his father interrupted, still dangerously quiet. “You've never had to earn a living. Anybody could tell that by what you say. Now, let me remind you: you're sleepin' in a pretty good bed; you're eatin' pretty fair food; you're wearin' pretty fine clothes. Just suppose one o' these noisy housekeepers—me, for instance—decided to let you do your own housekeepin'. May I ask what your proposition would be?”
“I'm earning nine dollars a week,” said Bibbs, sturdily. “It's enough. I shouldn't mind at all.”
“Who's payin' you that nine dollars a week?”
“My work!” Bibbs answered. “And I've done so well on that clipping-machine I believe I could work up to fifteen or even twenty a week at another job. I could be a fair plumber in a few months, I'm sure. I'd rather have a trade than be in business—I should, infinitely!”
“You better set about learnin' one pretty dam' quick!” But Sheridan struggled with his temper and again was partially successful in controlling it. “You better learn a trade over Sunday, because you're either goin' down with me to my office Monday morning—or—you can go to plumbing!”
“All right,” said Bibbs, gently. “I can get along.”
Sheridan raised his hands sardonically, as in prayer. “O God,” he said, “this boy was crazy enough before he began to earn his nine dollars a week, and now his money's gone to his head! Can't You do nothin' for him?” Then he flung his hands apart, palms outward, in a furious gesture of dismissal. “Get out o' this room! You got a skull that's thicker'n a whale's thigh-bone, but it's cracked spang all the way across! You hated the machine-shop so bad when I sent you there, you went and stayed sick for over two years—and now, when I offer to take you out of it and give you the mint, you holler for the shop like a calf for its mammy! You're cracked! Oh, but I got a fine layout here! One son died, one quit, and one's a loon! The loon's all I got left! H. P. Ellersly's wife had a crazy brother, and they undertook to keep him at the house. First morning he was there he walked straight though a ten-dollar plate-glass window out into the yard. He says, 'Oh, look at the pretty dandelion!' That's what you're doin'! You want to spend your life sayin', 'Oh, look at the pretty dandelion!' and you don't care a tinker's dam' what you bust! Well, mister, loon or no loon, cracked and crazy or whatever you are, I'll take you with me Monday morning, and I'll work you and learn you—yes, and I'll lam you, if I got to—until I've made something out of you that's fit to be called a business man! I'll keep at you while I'm able to stand, and if I have to lay down to die I'll be whisperin' at you till they get the embalmin'-fluid into me! Now go on, and don't let me hear from you again till you can come and tell me you've waked up, you poor, pitiful, dandelion-pickin' SLEEP-WALKER!”
Bibbs gave him a queer look. There was something like reproach in it, for once; but there was more than that—he seemed to be startled by his father's last word.