Collected Works of Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  “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.

  CHAPTER XXIV

  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 fro
m 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 Our

  City. Sees Big Improvement during Short Absence. Says No

  European City Holds Candle.” (Sheridan nodded approvingly here.)

  Bibbs came through the hall whistling, and entered the room briskly. “Well, father, did you want me?”