The Turmoil: A Novel

CHAPTER XXX

Sibyl and Roscoe were upon the point of leaving when Bibbs returned to the New House. He went straight to Sibyl and spoke to her quietly, but so that the others might hear.

“When you said that if I'd stop to think, I'd realize that no one would be apt to care enough about me to marry me, you were right,” he said. “I thought perhaps you weren't, and so I asked Miss Vertrees to marry me. It proved what you said of me, and disproved what you said of her. She refused.”

And, having thus spoken, he quitted the room as straightforwardly as he had entered it.

“He's SO queer!” Mrs. Sheridan gasped. “Who on earth would thought of his doin' THAT?”

“I told you,” said her husband, grimly.

“You didn't tell us he'd go over there and—”

“I told you she wouldn't have him. I told you she wouldn't have JIM, didn't I?”

Sibyl was altogether taken aback. “Do you supose it's true? Do you suppose she WOULDN'T?”

“He didn't look exactly like a young man that had just got things fixed up fine with his girl,” said Sheridan. “Not to me, he didn't!”

“But why would—”

“I told you,” he interrupted, angrily, “she ain't that kind of a girl! If you got to have proof, well, I'll tell you and get it over with, though I'd pretty near just as soon not have to talk a whole lot about my dead boy's private affairs. She wrote to Jim she couldn't take him, and it was a good, straight letter, too. It came to Jim's office; he never saw it. She wrote it the afternoon he was hurt.”

“I remember I saw her put a letter in the mail-box that afternoon,” said Roscoe. “Don't you remember, Sibyl? I told you about it—I was waiting for you while you were in there so long talking to her mother. It was just before we saw that something was wrong over here, and Edith came and called me.”

Sibyl shook her head, but she remembered. And she was not cast down, for, although some remnants of perplexity were left in her eyes, they were dimmed by an increasing glow of triumph; and she departed—after some further fragmentary discourse—visibly elated. After all, the guilty had not been exalted; and she perceived vaguely, but none the less surely, that her injury had been copiously avenged. She bestowed a contented glance upon the old house with the cupola, as she and Roscoe crossed the street.

When they had gone, Mrs. Sheridan indulged in reverie, but after a while she said, uneasily, “Papa, you think it would be any use to tell Bibbs about that letter?”

“I don't know,” he answered, walking moodily to the window. “I been thinkin' about it.” He came to a decision. “I reckon I will.” And he went up to Bibbs's room.

“Well, you goin' back on what you said?” he inquired, brusquely, as he opened the door. “You goin' to take it back and lay down on me again?”

“No,” said Bibbs.

“Well, perhaps I didn't have any call to accuse you of that. I don't know as you ever did go back on anything you said, exactly, though the Lord knows you've laid down on me enough. You certainly have!” Sheridan was baffled. This was not what he wished to say, but his words were unmanageable; he found himself unable to control them, and his querulous abuse went on in spite of him. “I can't say I expect much of you—not from the way you always been, up to now—unless you turn over a new leaf, and I don't see any encouragement to think you're goin' to do THAT! If you go down there and show a spark o' real GIT-up, I reckon the whole office'll fall in a faint. But if you're ever goin' to show any, you better begin right at the beginning and begin to show it to-morrow.”

“Yes—I'll try.”

“You better, if it's in you!” Sheridan was sheerly nonplussed. He had always been able to say whatever he wished to say, but his tongue seemed bewitched. He had come to tell Bibbs about Mary's letter, and to his own angry astonishment he found it impossible to do anything except to scold like a drudge-driver. “You better come down there with your mind made up to hustle harder than the hardest workin'-man that's under you, or you'll not get on very good with me, I tell you! The way to get ahead—and you better set it down in your books—the way to get ahead is to do ten times the work of the hardest worker that works FOR you. But you don't know what work is, yet. All you've ever done was just stand around and feed a machine a child could handle, and then come home and take a bath and go callin'. I tell you you're up against a mighty different proposition now, and if you're worth your salt—and you never showed any signs of it yet—not any signs that stuck out enough to bang somebody on the head and make 'em sit up and take notice—well, I want to say, right here and now—and you better listen, because I want to say just what I DO say. I say—”

He meandered to a full stop. His mouth hung open, and his mind was a hopeless blank.

Bibbs looked up patiently—an old, old look. “Yes, father; I'm listening.”

“That's all,” said Sheridan, frowning heavily. “That's all I came to say, and you better see't you remember it!”

He shook his head warningly, and went out, closing the door behind him with a crash. However, no sound of footsteps indicated his departure. He stopped just outside the door, and stood there a minute or more. Then abruptly he turned the knob and exhibited to his son a forehead liberally covered with perspiration.

“Look here,” he said, crossly. “That girl over yonder wrote Jim a letter—”

“I know,” said Bibbs. “She told me.”

“Well, I thought you needn't feel so much upset about it—” The door closed on his voice as he withdrew, but the conclusion of the sentence was nevertheless audible—“if you knew she wouldn't have Jim, either.”

And he stamped his way down-stairs to tell his wife to quit her frettin' and not bother him with any more fool's errands. She was about to inquire what Bibbs “said,” but after a second thought she decided not to speak at all. She merely murmured a wordless assent, and verbal communication was given over between them for the rest of that afternoon.

Bibbs and his father were gone when Mrs. Sheridan woke, the next morning, and she had a dreary day. She missed Edith woefully, and she worried about what might be taking place in the Sheridan Building. She felt that everything depended on how Bibbs “took hold,” and upon her husband's return in the evening she seized upon the first opportunity to ask him how things had gone. He was non-committal. What could anybody tell by the first day? He'd seen plenty go at things well enough right at the start and then blow up. Pretty near anybody could show up fair the first day or so. There was a big job ahead. This material, such as it was—Bibbs, in fact—had to be broken in to handling the work Roscoe had done; and then, at least as an overseer, he must take Jim's position in the Realty Company as well. He told her to ask him again in a month.

But during the course of dinner she gathered from some disjointed remarks of his that he and Bibbs had lunched together at the small restaurant where it had been Sheridan's custom to lunch with Jim, and she took this to be an encouraging sign. Bibbs went to his room as soon as they left the table, and her husband was not communicative after reading his paper.

She became an anxious spectator of Bibbs's progress as a man of business, although it was a progress she could glimpse but dimly and only in the evening, through his remarks and his father's at dinner. Usually Bibbs was silent, except when directly addressed, but on the first evening of the third week of his new career he offered an opinion which had apparently been the subject of previous argument.

“I'd like you to understand just what I meant about those storage-rooms, father,” he said, as Jackson placed his coffee before him. “Abercrombie agreed with me, but you wouldn't listen to him.”

“You can talk, if you want to, and I'll listen,” Sheridan returned, “but you can't show me that Jim ever took up with a bad thing. The roof fell because it hadn't had time to settle and on account of weather conditions. I want that building put just the way Jim planned it.”

“You can't have it,” said Bibbs. “You can't, because Jim planned for the building to stand up, and it won't do it. The other one—the one that didn't fall—is so shot with cracks we haven't dared use it for storage. It won't stand weight. There's only one thing to do: get both buildings down as quickly as we can, and build over. Brick's the best and cheapest in the long run for that type.”

Sheridan looked sarcastic. “Fine! What we goin' to do for storage-rooms while we're waitin' for those few bricks to be laid?”

“Rent,” Bibbs returned, promptly. “We'll lose money if we don't rent, anyhow—they were waiting so long for you to give the warehouse matter your attention after the roof fell. You don't know what an amount of stuff they've got piled up on us over there. We'd have to rent until we could patch up those process perils—and the Krivitch Manufacturing Company's plant is empty, right across the street. I took an option on it for us this morning.”

Sheridan's expression was queer. “Look here!” he said, sharply. “Did you go and do that without consulting me?”

“It didn't cost anything,” said Bibbs. “It's only until to-morrow afternoon at two o'clock. I undertook to convince you before then.”

“Oh, you did?” Sheridan's tone was sardonic. “Well, just suppose you couldn't convince me.”

“I can, though—and I intend to,” said Bibbs, quietly. “I don't think you understand the condition of those buildings you want patched up.”

“Now, see here,” said Sheridan, with slow emphasis; “suppose I had my mind set about this. JIM thought they'd stand, and suppose it was—well, kind of a matter of sentiment with me to prove he was right.”

Bibbs looked at him compassionately. “I'm sorry if you have a sentiment about it, father,” he said. “But whether you have or not can't make a difference. You'll get other people hurt if you trust that process, and that won't do. And if you want a monument to Jim, at least you want one that will stand. Besides, I don't think you can reasonably defend sentiment in this particular kind of affair.”

“Oh, you don't?”

“No, but I'm sorry you didn't tell me you felt it.”

Sheridan was puzzled by his son's tone. “Why are you 'sorry'?” he asked, curiously.

“Because I had the building inspector up there, this noon,” said Bibbs, “and I had him condemn both those buildings.”

“What?”

“He'd been afraid to do it before, until he heard from us—afraid you'd see he lost his job. But he can't un-condemn them—they've got to come down now.”

Sheridan gave him a long and piercing stare from beneath lowered brows. Finally he said, “How long did they give you on that option to convince me?”

“Until two o'clock to-morrow afternoon.”

“All right,” said Sheridan, not relaxing. “I'm convinced.”

Bibbs jumped up. “I thought you would be. I'll telephone the Krivitch agent. He gave me the option until to-morrow, but I told him I'd settle it this evening.”

Sheridan gazed after him as he left the room, and then, though his expression did not alter in the slightest, a sound came from him that startled his wife. It had been a long time since she had heard anything resembling a chuckle from him, and this sound—although it was grim and dry—bore that resemblance.

She brightened eagerly. “Looks like he was startin' right well don't it, papa?”

“Startin'? Lord! He got me on the hip! Why, HE knew what I wanted—that's why he had the inspector up there, so't he'd have me beat before we even started to talk about it. And did you hear him? 'Can't reasonably defend SENTIMENT!' And the way he says 'Us': 'Took an option for Us'! 'Stuff piled up on Us'!”

There was always an alloy for Mrs. Sheridan. “I don't just like the way he looks, though, papa.”

“Oh, there's got to be something! Only one chick left at home, so you start to frettin' about IT!”

“No. He's changed. There's kind of a settish look to his face, and—”

“I guess that's the common sense comin' out on him, then,” said Sheridan. “You'll see symptoms like that in a good many business men, I expect.”

“Well, and he don't have as good color as he was gettin' before. And he'd begun to fill out some, but—”

Sheridan gave forth another dry chuckle, and, going round the table to her, patted her upon the shoulder with his left hand, his right being still heavily bandaged, though he no longer wore a sling. “That's the way it is with you, mamma—got to take your frettin' out one way if you don't another!”

“No. He don't look well. It ain't exactly the way he looked when he begun to get sick that time, but he kind o' seems to be losin', some way.”

“Yes, he may 'a' lost something,” said Sheridan. “I expect he's lost a whole lot o' foolishness besides his God-forsaken notions about writin' poetry and—”

“No,” his wife persisted. “I mean he looks right peakid. And yesterday, when he was settin' with us, he kept lookin' out the window. He wasn't readin'.”

“Well, why shouldn't he look out the window?”

“He was lookin' over there. He never read a word all afternoon, I don't believe.”

“Look, here!” said Sheridan. “Bibbs might 'a' kept goin' on over there the rest of his life, moonin' on and on, but what he heard Sibyl say did one big thing, anyway. It woke him up out of his trance. Well, he had to go and bust clean out with a bang; and that stopped his goin' over there, and it stopped his poetry, but I reckon he's begun to get pretty fair pay for what he lost. I guess a good many young men have had to get over worries like his; they got to lose SOMETHING if they're goin' to keep ahead o' the procession nowadays—and it kind o' looks to me, mamma, like Bibbs might keep quite a considerable long way ahead. Why, a year from now I'll bet you he won't know there ever WAS such a thing as poetry! And ain't he funny? He wanted to stick to the shop so's he could 'think'! What he meant was, think about something useless. Well, I guess he's keepin' his mind pretty occupied the other way these days. Yes, sir, it took a pretty fair-sized shock to get him out of his trance, but it certainly did the business.” He patted his wife's shoulder again, and then, without any prefatory symptoms, broke into a boisterous laugh.

“Honest, mamma, he works like a gorilla!”