“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 beli
eve 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—”
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 165