The Turmoil (29 page)

“Mary,” said Bibbs, after a time, “am I a sleep-walker?”

She laughed a little, then looked grave. “Does your father say you are?”

“Yes—when he’s in a mood to flatter me. Other times, other names. He has quite a list.”

“You mustn’t mind,” she said, gently. “He’s been getting some pretty severe shocks. What you’ve told me makes me pretty sorry for him, Bibbs. I’ve always been sure he’s very big.”

“Yes. Big and—blind. He’s like a Hercules without eyes and without any consciousness except that of his strength and of his purpose to grow stronger. Stronger for what? For nothing.”

“Are you sure, Bibbs? It CAN’T be for nothing; it must be stronger for something, even though he doesn’t know what it is. Perhaps what he and his kind are struggling for is something so great they COULDN’T see it—so great none of us could see it.”

“No, he’s just like some blind, unconscious thing heaving underground—”

“Till he breaks through and leaps out into the daylight,” she finished for him, cheerily.

“Into the smoke,” said Bibbs. “Look at the powder of coal-dust already dirtying the decent snow, even though it’s Sunday. That’s from the little pigs; the big ones aren’t so bad, on Sunday! There’s a fleck of soot on your cheek. Some pig sent it out into the air; he might as well have thrown it on you. It would have been braver, for then he’d have taken his chance of my whipping him for it if I could.”

“IS there soot on my cheek, Bibbs, or were you only saying so rhetorically? IS there?”

“Is there? There ARE soot on your cheeks, Mary—a fleck on each. One landed since I mentioned the first.”

She halted immediately, giving him her handkerchief, and he succeeded in transferring most of the black from her face to the cambric. They were entirely matter-of-course about it.

An elderly couple, it chanced, had been walking behind Bibbs and Mary for the last block or so, and passed ahead during the removal of the soot. “There!” said the elderly wife. “You’re always wrong when you begin guessing about strangers. Those two young people aren’t honeymooners at all—they’ve been married for years. A blind man could see that.”

“I wish I did know who threw that soot on you,” said Bibbs, looking up at the neighboring chimneys, as they went on. “They arrest children for throwing snowballs at the street-cars, but—”

“But they don’t arrest the street-cars for shaking all the pictures in the houses crooked every time they go by. Nor for the uproar they make. I wonder what’s the cost in nerves for the noise of the city each year. Yes, we pay the price for living in a ‘growing town,’ whether we have money to pay or none.”

“Who is it gets the pay?” said Bibbs.

“Not I!” she laughed.

“Nobody gets it. There isn’t any pay; there’s only money. And only some of the men down-town get much of that. That’s what my father wants me to get.”

“Yes,” she said, smiling to him, and nodding. “And you don’t want it, and you don’t need it.”

“But you don’t think I’m a sleep-walker, Mary?” He had told her of his father’s new plans for him, though he had not described the vigor and picturesqueness of their setting forth. “You think I’m right?”

“A thousand times!” she cried. “There aren’t so many happy people in this world, I think—and you say you’ve found what makes you happy. If it’s a dream—keep it!”

“The thought of going down there—into the money shuffle—I hate it as I never hated the shop!” he said. “I hate it! And the city itself, the city that the money shuffle has made—just look at it! Look at it in winter. The snow’s tried hard to make the ugliness bearable, but the ugliness is winning; it’s making the snow hideous; the snow’s getting dirty on top, and it’s foul underneath with the dirt and disease of the unclean street. And the dirt and the ugliness and the rush and the noise aren’t the worst of it; it’s what the dirt and ugliness and rush and noise MEAN—that’s the worst! The outward things are insufferable, but they’re only the expression of a spirit— a blind enbryo of a spirit, not yet a soul—oh, just greed! And this ‘go ahead’ nonsense! Oughtn’t it all to be a fellowship? I shouldn’t want to get ahead if I could—I’d want to help the other fellow to keep up with me.”

“I read something the other day and remembered it for you,” said Mary. “It was something Burne-Jones said of a picture he was going to paint: ‘In the first picture I shall make a man walking in the street of a great city, full of all kinds of happy life: children, and lovers walking, and ladies leaning from the windows all down great lengths of a street leading to the city walls; and there the gates are wide open, letting in a space of green field and cornfield in harvest; and all round his head a great rain of swirling autumn leaves blowing from a little walled graveyard.”

“And if I painted,” Bibbs returned, “I’d paint a lady walking in the street of a great city, full of all kinds of uproarious and futile life—children being taught only how to make money, and lovers hurrying to get richer, and ladies who’d given up trying to wash their windows clean, and the gates of the city wide open, letting in slums and slaughter-houses and freight-yards, and all round this lady’s head a great rain of swirling soot—” He paused, adding, thoughtfully: “And yet I believe I’m glad that soot got on your cheek. It was just as if I were your brother—the way you gave me your handkerchief to rub it off for you. Still, Edith never—”

“Didn’t she?” said Mary, as he paused again.

“No. And I—” He contented himself with shaking his head instead of offering more definite information. Then he realized that they were passing the New House, and he sighed profoundly. “Mary, our walk’s almost over.”

She looked as blank. “So it is, Bibbs.”

They said no more until they came to her gate. As they drifted slowly to a stop, the door of Roscoe’s house opened, and Roscoe came out with Sibyl, who was startlingly pale. She seemed little enfeebled by her illness, however, walking rather quickly at her husband’s side and not taking his arm. The two crossed the street without appearing to see Mary and her companion, and entering the New House, were lost to sight. Mary gazed after them gravely, but Bibbs, looking at Mary, did not see them.

“Mary,” he said, “you seem very serious. Is anything bothering you?”

“No, Bibbs.” And she gave him a bright, quick look that made him instantly unreasonably happy.

“I know you want to go in—” he began.

“No. I don’t want to.”

“I mustn’t keep you standing here, and I mustn’t go in with you— but—I just wanted to say—I’ve seemed very stupid to myself this morning, grumbling about soot and all that—while all the time I— Mary, I think it’s been the very happiest of all the hours you’ve given me. I do. And—I don’t know just why—but it’s seemed to me that it was one I’d always remember. And you,” he added, falteringly, “you look so—so beautiful to-day!”

“It must have been the soot on my cheek, Bibbs.”

“Mary, will you tell me something?” he asked.

“I think I will.”

“It’s something I’ve had a lot of theories about, but none of them ever just fits. You used to wear furs in the fall, but now it’s so much colder, you don’t—you never wear them at all any more. Why don’t you?”

Her eyes fell for a moment, and she grew red. Then she looked up gaily. “Bibbs, if I tell you the answer will you promise not to ask any more questions?”

“Yes. Why did you stop wearing them?”

“Because I found I’d be warmer without them!” She caught his hand quickly in her own for an instant, laughed into his eyes, and ran into the house.

It is the consoling attribute of unused books that their decorative warmth will so often make even a ready-made library the actual “living-room” of a family to whom the shelved volumes are indeed sealed. Thus it was with Sheridan, who read nothing except newspapers, business letters, and figures; who looked upon books as he looked upon bric-a-brac or crocheting—when he was at home, and not abed or eating, he was in the library.

He stood in the many-colored light of the stained-glass window at the far end of the long room, when Roscoe and his wife came in, and he exhaled a solemnity. His deference to the Sabbath was manifest, as always, in the length of his coat and the closeness of his Saturday-night shave; and his expression, to match this religious pomp, was more than Sabbatical, but the most dismaying of his demonstrations was his keeping his hand in his sling.

Sibyl advanced to the middle of the room and halted there, not looking at him, but down at her muff, in which, it could be seen, her hands were nervously moving. Roscoe went to a chair in another part of the room. There was a deadly silence.

But Sibyl found a shaky voice, after an interval of gulping, though she was unable to lift her eyes, and the darkling lids continued to veil them. She spoke hurriedly, like an ungifted child reciting something committed to memory, but her sincerity was none the less evident for that.

“Father Sheridan, you and mother Sheridan have always been so kind to me, and I would hate to have you think I don’t appreciate it, from the way I acted. I’ve come to tell you I am sorry for the way I did that night, and to say I know as well as anybody the way I behaved, and it will never happen again, because it’s been a pretty hard lesson; and when we come back, some day, I hope you’ll see that you’ve got a daughter-in-law you never need to be ashamed of again. I want to ask you to excuse me for the way I did, and I can say I haven’t any feelings toward Edith now, but only wish her happiness and good in her new life. I thank you for all your kindness to me, and I know I made a poor return for it, but if you can overlook the way I behaved I know I would feel a good deal happier—and I know Roscoe would, too. I wish to promise not to be as foolish in the future, and the same error would never occur again to make us all so unhappy, if you can be charitable enought to excuse it this time.”

He looked steadily at her without replying, and she stood before him, never lifting her eyes; motionless, save where the moving fur proved the agitation of her hands within the muff.

“All right,” he said at last.

She looked up then with vast relief, though there was a revelation of heavy tears when the eyelids lifted.

“Thank you,” she said. “There’s something else—about something different—I want to say to you, but I want mother Sheridan to hear it, too.”

“She’s upstairs in her room,” said Sheridan. “Roscoe—”

Sibyl interrupted. She had just seen Bibbs pass through the hall and begin to ascend the stairs; and in a flash she instinctively perceived the chance for precisely the effect she wanted.

“No, let me go,” she said. “I want to speak to her a minute first, anyway.”

And she went away quickly, gaining the top of the stairs in time to see Bibbs enter his room and close the door. Sibyl knew that Bibbs, in his room, had overheard her quarrel with Edith in the hall outside; for bitter Edith, thinking the more to shame her, had subsequently informed her of the circumstance. Sibyl had just remembered this, and with the recollection there had flashed the thought—out of her own experience— that people are often much more deeply impressed by words they overhear than by words directly addressed to them. Sibyl intended to make it impossible for Bibbs not to overhear. She did not hesitate—her heart was hot with the old sore, and she believed wholly in the justice of her cause and in the truth of what she was going to say. Fate was virtuous at times; it had delivered into her hands the girl who had affronted her.

Mrs. Sheridan was in her own room. The approach of Sibyl and Roscoe had driven her from the library, for she had miscalculated her husband’s mood, and she felt that if he used his injured hand as a mark of emphasis again, in her presence, she would (as she thought of it) “have a fit right there.” She heard Sibyl’s step, and pretended to be putting a touch to her hair before a mirror.

“I was just coming down,” she said, as the door opened.

“Yes, he wants you to,” said Sibyl. “It’s all right, mother Sheridan. He’s forgiven me.”

Mrs. Sheridan sniffed instantly; tears appeared. She kissed her daughter-in-law’s cheek; then, in silence, regarded the mirror afresh, wiped her eyes, and applied powder.

“And I hope Edith will be happy,” Sibyl added, inciting more applications of Mrs. Sheridan’s handkerchief and powder.

“Yes, yes,” murmured the good woman. “We mustn’t make the worst of things.”

“Well, there was something else I had to say, and he wants you to hear it, too,” said Sibyl. “We better go down, mother Sheridan.”

She led the way, Mrs. Sheridan following obediently, but when they came to a spot close by Bibbs’s door, Sibyl stopped. “I want to tell you about it first,” she said, abruptly. “It isn’t a secret, of course, in any way; it’s something the whole family has to know, and the sooner the whole family knows it the better. It’s something it wouldn’t be RIGHT for us ALL not to understand, and of course father Sheridan most of all. But I want to just kind of go over it first with you; it’ll kind of help me to see I got it all straight. I haven’t got any reason for saying it except the good of the family, and it’s nothing to me, one way or the other, of course, except for that. I oughtn’t to’ve behaved the way I did that night, and it seems to me if there’s anything I can do to help the family, I ought to, because it would help show I felt the right way. Well, what I want to do is to tell this so’s to keep the family from being made a fool of. I don’t want to see the family just made use of and twisted around her finger by somebody that’s got no more heart than so much ice, and just as sure to bring troubles in the long run as—as Edith’s mistake is. Well, then, this is the way it is. I’ll just tell you how it looks to me and see if it don’t strike you the same way.”

Within the room, Bibbs, much annoyed, tapped his ear with his pencil. He wished they wouldn’t stand talking near his door when he was trying to write. He had just taken from his trunk the manuscript of a poem begun the preceding Sunday afternoon, and he had some ideas he wanted to fix upon paper before they maliciously seized the first opportunity to vanish, for they were but gossamer. Bibbs was pleased with the beginnings of his poem, and if he could carry it through he meant to dare greatly with it—he would venture it upon an editor. For he had his plan of life now: his day would be of manual labor and thinking —he could think of his friend and he could think in cadences for poems, to the crashing of the strong machine—and if his father turned him out of home and out of the Works, he would work elsewhere and live elsewhere. His father had the right, and it mattered very little to Bibbs—he faced the prospect of a working-man’s lodging-house without trepidation. He could find a washstand to write upon, he thought; and every evening when he left Mary he would write a little; and he would write on holidays and on Sundays—on Sundays in the afternoon. In a lodging-house, at least he wouldn’t be interrupted by his sister-in- law’s choosing the immediate vicinity of his door for conversations evidently important to herself, but merely disturbing to him. He frowned plaintively, wishing he could think of some polite way of asking her to go away. But, as she went on, he started violently, dropping manuscript and pencil upon the floor.