The Turmoil (21 page)

“What is it like—exactly?”

“I get up at six,” he said. “I have a lunch-basket to carry with me, which is aristocratic and no advantage. The other workmen have tin buckets, and tin buckets are better. I leave the house at six-thirty, and I’m at work in my overalls at seven. I have an hour off at noon, and work again from one till five.”

“But the work itself?”

“It wasn’t muscularly exhausting—not at all. They couldn’t give me a heavier job because I wasn’t good enough.”

“But what will you do? I want to know.”

“When I left,” said Bibbs, “I was ‘on’ what they call over there a ‘clipping-machine,’ in one of the ‘by-products’ departments, and that’s what I’ll be sent back to.”

“But what is it?” she insisted.

Bibbs explained. “It’s very simple and very easy. I feed long strips of zinc into a pair of steel jaws, and the jaws bite the zinc into little circles. All I have to do is to see that the strip goes into the jaws at a certain angle—and yet I was a very bad hand at it.”

He had kept his voice cheerful as he spoke, but he had grown a shade paler, and there was a latent anguish deep in his eyes. He may have known it and wished her not to see it, for he turned away.

“You do that all day long?” she asked, and as he nodded, “It seems incredible!” she exclaimed. “YOU feeding a strip of zinc into a machine nine hours a day! No wonder—” She broke off, and then, after a keen glance at his face, she said: “I should think you WOULD have been a ‘bad hand at it’!”

He laughed ruefully. “I think it’s the noise, though I’m ashamed to say it. You see, it’s a very powerful machine, and there’s a sort of rhythmical crashing—a crash every time the jaws bite off a circle.”

“How often is that?”

“The thing should make about sixty-eight disks a minute—a little more than one a second.”

“And you’re close to it?”

“Oh, the workman has to sit in its lap,” he said, turning to her more gaily. “The others don’t mind. You see, it’s something wrong with me. I have an idiotic way of flinching from the confounded thing—I flinch and duck a little every time the crash comes, and I couldn’t get over it. I was a treat to the other workmen in that room; they’ll be glad to see me back. They used to laugh at me all day long.”

Mary’s gaze was averted from Bibbs now; she sat with her elbow resting on the arm of the chair, her lifted hand pressed against her cheek. She was staring at the wall, and her eyes had a burning brightness in them.

“It doesn’t seem possible any one could do that to you,” she said, in a low voice. “No. He’s not kind. He ought to be proud to help you to the leisure to write books; it should be his greatest privilege to have them published for you—”

“Can’t you SEE him?” Bibbs interrupted, a faint ripple of hilarity in his voice. “If he could understand what you’re saying—and if you can imagine his taking such a notion, he’d have had R. T. Bloss put up posters all over the country: ‘Read B. Sheridan. Read the Poet with a Punch!’ No. It’s just as well he never got the—But what’s the use? I’ve never written anything worth printing, and I never shall.”

“You could!” she said.

“That’s because you’ve never seen the poor little things I’ve tried to do.”

“You wouldn’t let me, but I KNOW you could! Ah, it’s a pity!”

“It isn’t,” said BIBBS, honestly. “I never could—but you’re the kindest lady in this world, Miss Vertrees.”

She gave him a flashing glance, and it was as kind as he said she was. “That sounds wrong,” she said, impulsively. “I mean ‘Miss Vertrees.’ I’ve thought of you by your first name ever since I met you. Wouldn’t you rather call me ‘Mary’?”

Bibbs was dazzled; he drew a long, deep breath and did not speak.

“Wouldn’t you?” she asked, without a trace of coquetry.

“If I CAN!” he said, in a low voice.

“Ah, that’s very pretty!” she laughed. “You’re such an honest person, it’s pleasant to have you gallant sometimes, by way of variety.” She became grave again immediately. “I hear myself laughing as if it were some one else. It sounds like laughter on the eve of a great calamity.” She got up restlessly, crossed the room and leaned against the wall, facing him. “You’ve GOT to go back to that place?”

He nodded.

“And the other time you did it—”

“Just over it,” said Bibbs. “Two years. But I don’t mind the prospect of a repetition so much as—”

“So much as what?” she prompted, as he stopped.

Bibbs looked up at her shyly. “I want to say it, but—but I come to a dead balk when I try. I—”

“Go on. Say it, whatever it is,” she bade him. “You wouldn’t know how to say anything I shouldn’t like.”

“I doubt if you’d either like or dislike what I want to say,” he returned, moving uncomfortably in his chair and looking at his feet— he seemed to feel awkward, thoroughly. “You see, all my life—until I met you—if I ever felt like saying anything, I wrote it instead. Saying things is a new trick for me, and this—well, it’s just this: I used to feel as if I hadn’t ever had any sort of a life at all. I’d never been of use to anything or anybody, and I’d never had anything, myself, except a kind of haphazard thinking. But now it’s different— I’m still of no use to anybody, and I don’t see any prospect of being useful, but I have had something for myself. I’ve had a beautiful and happy experience, and it makes my life seem to be—I mean I’m glad I’ve lived it! That’s all; it’s your letting me be near you sometimes, as you have, this strange, beautiful, happy little while!”

He did not once look up, and reached silence, at the end of what he had to say, with his eyes still awkwardly regarding his feet. She did not speak, but a soft rustling of her garments let him know that she had gone back to her chair again. The house was still; the shabby old room was so quiet that the sound of a creaking in the wall seemed sharp and loud.

And yet, when Mary spoke at last, her voice was barely audible. “If you think it has been—happy—to be friends with me—you’d want to—to make it last.”

“Yes,” said Bibbs, as faintly.

“You’d want to go on being my friend as long as we live, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes,” he gulped.

“But you make that kind of speech to me because you think it’s over.”

He tried to evade her. “Oh, a day-laborer can’t come in his overalls—”

“No,” she interrupted, with a sudden sharpness. “You said what you did because you think the shop’s going to kill you.”

“No, no!”

“Yes, you do think that!” She rose to her feet again and came and stood before him. “Or you think it’s going to send you back to the sanitarium. Don’t deny it, Bibbs. There! See how easily I call you that! You see I’m a friend, or I couldn’t do it. Well, if you meant what you said—and you did mean it, I know it!—you’re not going to go back to the sanitarium. The shop sha’n’t hurt you. It sha’n’t!”

And now Bibbs looked up. She stood before him, straight and tall, splendid in generous strength, her eyes shining and wet.

“If I mean THAT much to you,” she cried, “they can’t harm you! Go back to the shop—but come to me when your day’s work is done. Let the machines crash their sixty-eight times a minute, but remember each crash that deafens you is that much nearer the evening and me!”

He stumbled to his feet. “You say—” he gasped.

“Every evening, dear Bibbs!”

He could only stare, bewildered.

“EVERY evening. I want you. They sha’n’t hurt you again!” And she held out her hand to him; it was strong and warm in his tremulous clasp. “If I could, I’d go and feed the strips of zinc to the machine with you,” she said. “But all day long I’ll send my thoughts to you. You must keep remembering that your friend stands beside you. And when the work is done—won’t the night make up for the day?”

Light seemed to glow from her; he was blinded by that radiance of kindness. But all he could say was, huskily, “To think you’re there —with me—standing beside the old zinc-eater—”

And they laughed and looked at each other, and at last Bibbs found what it meant not to be alone in the world. He had a friend.

When he came into the New House, a few minutes later, he found his father sitting alone by the library fire. Bibbs went in and stood before him. “I’m cured, father,” he said. “When do I go back to the shop? I’m ready.”

The desolate and grim old man did not relax. “I was sittin’ up to give you a last chance to say something like that. I reckon it’s about time! I just wanted to see if you’d have manhood enough not to make me take you over there by the collar. Last night I made up my mind I’d give you just one more day. Well, you got to it before I did—pretty close to the eleventh hour! All right. Start in to-morrow. It’s the first o’ the month. Think you can get up in time?”

“Six o’clock,” Bibbs responded, briskly. “And I want to tell you— I’m going in a ‘cheerful spirit.’ As you said, I’ll go and I’ll ‘like it’!”

“That’s YOUR lookout!” his father grunted. “They’ll put you back on the clippin’-machine. You get nine dollars a week.”

“More than I’m worth, too,” said Bibbs, cheerily. “That reminds me, I didn’t mean YOU by ‘Midas’ in that nonsense I’d been writing. I meant—”

“Makes a hell of a lot o’ difference what you meant!”

“I just wanted you to know. Good night, father.”

“G’night!”

The sound of the young man’s footsteps ascending the stairs became inaudible, and the house was quiet. But presently, as Sheridan sat staring angrily at the fire, the shuffling of a pair of slipers could be heard descending, and Mrs. Sheridan made her appearance, her oblique expression and the state of her toilette being those of a person who, after trying unsuccessfully to sleep on one side, has got up to look for burglars.

“Papa!” she exclaimed, drowsily. “Why’n’t you go to bed? It must be goin’ on ‘leven o’clock!”

She yawned, and seated herself near him, stretching out her hands to the fire. “What’s the matter?” she asked, sleep and anxiety striving sluggishly with each other in her voice. “I knew you were worried all dinner-time. You got something new on your mind besides Jim’s bein’ taken away like he was. What’s worryin’ you now, papa?”

“Nothin’.”

She jeered feebly. “N’ tell ME that! You sat up to see Bibbs, didn’t you?”

“He starts in at the shop again to-morrow morning,” said Sheridan.

“Just the same as he did before?”

“Just preCISELY!”

“How—how long you goin’ to keep him at it, papa?” she asked, timidly.

“Until he KNOWS something!” The unhappy man struck his palms together, then got to his feet and began to pace the room, as was his wont when he talked. “He’ll go back to the machine he couldn’t learn to tend properly in the six months he was there, and he’ll stick to it till he DOES learn it! Do you suppose that lummix ever asked himself WHY I want him to learn it? No! And I ain’t a-goin’ to tell him, either! When he went there I had ‘em set him on the simplest machine we got—and he stuck there! How much prospect would there be of his learnin’ to run the whole business if he can’t run the easiest machine in it? I sent him there to make him THOROUGH. And what happened? He didn’t LIKE it! That boy’s whole life, there’s been a settin’ up o’ something mulish that’s against everything I want him to do. I don’t know what it is, but it’s got to be worked out of him. Now, labor ain’t any more a simple question than what it was when we were young. My idea is that, outside o’ union troubles, the man that can manage workin’-in men is the man that’s been one himself. Well, I set Bibbs to learn the men and to learn the business, and HE set himself to balk on the first job! That’s what he did, and the balk’s lasted close on to three years. If he balks again I’m just done with him! Sometimes I feel like I was pretty near done with everything, anyhow!”

“I knew there was something else,” said Mrs. Sheridan, blinking over a yawn. “You better let it go till to-morrow and get to bed now— ‘less you’ll tell me?”

“Suppose something happened to Roscoe,” he said. “THEN what’d I have to look forward to? THEN what could I depend on to hold things together? A lummix! A lummix that hasn’t learned how to push a strip o’ zinc along a groove!”

“Roscoe?” she yawned. “You needn’t worry about Roscoe, papa. He’s the strongest child we had. I never did know anybody keep better health than he does. I don’t believe he’s even had a cold in five years. You better go up to bed, papa.”

“Suppose something DID happen to him, though. You don’t know what it means, keepin’ property together these days—just keepin’ it ALIVE, let alone makin’ it grow the way I do. I’ve seen too many estates hacked away in chunks, big and little. I tell you when a man dies the wolves come out o’ the woods, pack after pack, to see what they can tear off for themselves; and if that dead man’s chuldern ain’t on the job, night and day, everything he built’ll get carried off. Carried off? I’ve seen a big fortune behave like an ash-barrel in a cyclone— there wasn’t even a dust-heap left to tell where it stood! I’ve seen it, time and again. My Lord! when I think o’ such things comin’ to ME! It don’t seem like I deserved it—no man ever tried harder to raise his boys right than I have. I planned and planned and planned how to bring ‘em up to be guards to drive the wolves off, and how to be builders to build, and build bigger. I tell you this business life is no fool’s job nowadays—a man’s got to have eyes in the back of his head. You hear talk, sometimes, ‘d make you think the millennium had come—but right the next breath you’ll hear somebody hollerin’ about ‘the great unrest.’ You BET there’s a ‘great unrest’! There ain’t any man alive smart enough to see what it’s goin’ to do to us in the end, nor what day it’s got set to bust loose, but it’s frothin’ and bubblin’ in the boiler. This country’s been fillin’ up with it from all over the world for a good many years, and the old camp-meetin’ days are dead and done with. Church ain’t what it used to be. Nothin’s what it used to be—everything’s turned up from the bottom, and the growth is so big the roots stick out in the air. There’s an awful ruction goin’ on, and you got to keep hoppin’ if you’re goin’ to keep your balance on the top of it. And the schemers! They run like bugs on the bottom of a board—after any piece o’ money they hear is loose. Fool schemes and crooked schemes; the fool ones are the most and the worst! You got to FIGHT to keep your money after you’ve made it. And the woods are full o’ mighty industrious men that’s got only one motto: ‘Get the other fellow’s money before he gets yours!’ And when a man’s built as I have, when he’s built good and strong, and made good things grow and prosper—THOSE are the fellows that lay for the chance to slide in and sneak the benefit of it and put their names to it! And what’s the use of my havin’ ever been born, if such a thing as that is goin’ to happen? What’s the use of my havin’ worked my life and soul into my business, if it’s all goin’ to be dispersed and scattered soon as I’m in the ground?”