The Turmoil (34 page)

“Yes.”

“Yes, he is so!” Sheridan now had the air of a rambling talker and gossip with all day on his hands. “Take him on Bibbs’s case. I was talkin’ about Bibbs’s case with him this morning. Well, you’d laugh to hear the way ole Gurney talks about THAT! ‘Course he IS just as much a friend as he is doctor—and he takes as much interest in Bibbs as if he was in the family. He says Bibbs isn’t anyways bad off YET; and he thinks he could stand the pace and get fat on it if—well, this is what’d made YOU laugh if you’d been there, Miss Vertrees—honest it would!” He paused to chuckle, and stole a glance at her. She was gazing straight before her at the wall; her lips were parted, and— visibly—she was breathing heavily and quickly. He feared that she was growing furiously angry; but he had led to what he wanted to say, and he went on, determined now to say it all. He leaned forward and altered his voice to one of confidential friendliness, though in it he still maintained a tone which indicated that ole Doc Gurney’s opinion was only a joke he shared with her. “Yes, sir, you certainly would ‘a’ laughed! Why, that ole man thinks YOU got something to do with it. You’ll have to blame it on him, young lady, if it makes you feel like startin’ out to whip somebody! He’s actually got THIS theory: he says Bibbs got to gettin’ better while he worked over there at the shop because you kept him cheered up and feelin’ good. And he says if you could manage to just stand him hangin’ around a little— maybe not much, but just SOMEtimes—again, he believed it’d do Bibbs a mighty lot o’ good. ‘Course, that’s only what the doctor said. Me, I don’t know anything about that; but I can say this much—I never saw any such a MENTAL improvement in anybody in my life as I have lately in Bibbs. I expect you’d find him a good deal more entertaining than what he used to be—and I know it’s a kind of embarrassing thing to suggest after the way he piled in over here that day to ask you to stand up before the preacher with him, but accordin’ to ole Doc GURNEY, he’s got you on his brain so bad—”

Mary jumped. “Mr. Sheridan!” she exclaimed.

He sighed profoundly. “There! I noticed you were gettin’ mad. I didn’t —”

“No, no, no!” she cried. “But I don’t understand—and I think you don’t. What is it you want me to do?”

He sighed again, but this time with relief. “Well, well!” he said. “You’re right. It’ll be easier to talk plain. I ought to known I could with you, all the time. I just hoped you’d let that boy come and see you sometimes, once more. Could you?”

“You don’t understand.” She clasped her hands together in a sorrowful gesture. “Yes, we must talk plain. Bibbs heard that I’d tried to make your oldest son care for me because I was poor, and so Bibbs came and asked me to marry him—because he was sorry for me. And I CAN’T see him any more,” she cried in distress. “I CAN’T!”

Sheridan cleared his throat uncomfortably. “You mean because he thought that about you?”

“No, no! What he thought was TRUE!”

“Well—you mean he was so much in—you mean he thought so much of you—” The words were inconceivably awkward upon Sheridan’s tongue; he seemed to be in doubt even about pronouncing them, but after a ghastly pause he bravely repeated them. “You mean he thought so much of you that you just couldn’t stand him around?”

“NO! He was sorry for me. He cared for me; he was fond of me; and he’d respected me—too much! In the finest way he loved me, if you like, and he’d have done anything on earth for me, as I would for him, and as he knew I would. It was beautiful, Mr. Sheridan,” she said. “But the cheap, bad things one has done seem always to come back—they wait, and pull you down when you’re happiest. Bibbs found me out, you see; and he wasn’t ‘in love’ with me at all.”

“He wasn’t? Well, it seems to me he gave up everything he wanted to do—it was fool stuff, but he certainly wanted it mighty bad—he just threw it away and walked right up and took the job he swore he never would—just for you. And it looks to me as if a man that’d do that must think quite a heap o’ the girl he does it for! You say it was only because he was sorry, but let me tell you there’s only ONE girl he could feel THAT sorry for! Yes, sir!”

“No, no,” she said. “Bibbs isn’t like other men—he would do anything for anybody.”

Sheridan grinned. “Perhaps not so much as you think, nowadays,” he said. “For instance, I got kind of a suspicion he doesn’t believe in ‘sentiment in business.’ But that’s neither here nor there. What he wanted was, just plain and simple, for you to marry him. Well, I was afraid his thinkin’ so much OF you had kind o’ sickened you of him— the way it does sometimes. But from the way you talk, I understand that ain’t the trouble.” He coughed, and his voice trembled a little. “Now here, Miss Vertrees, I don’t have to tell you—because you see things easy—I know I got no business comin’ to you like this, but I had to make Bibbs go my way instead of his own—I had to do it for the sake o’ my business and on his own account, too—and I expect you got some idea how it hurt him to give up. Well, he’s made good. He didn’t come in half-hearted or mean; he came in—all the way! But there isn’t anything in it to him; you can see he’s just shut his teeth on it and goin’ ahead with dust in his mouth. You see, one way of lookin’ at it, he’s got nothin’ to work FOR. And it seems to me like it cost him your friendship, and I believe—honest—that’s what hurt him the worst. Now you said we’d talk plain. Why can’t you let him come back?”

She covered her face desperately with her hands. “I can’t!”

He rose, defeated, and looking it.

“Well, I mustn’t press you,” he said, gently.

At that she cried out, and dropped her hands and let him see her face. “Ah! He was only sorry for me!”

He gazed at her intently. Mary was proud, but she had a fatal honesty, and it confessed the truth of her now; she was helpless. It was so clear that even Sheridan, marveling and amazed, was able to see it. Then a change came over him; gloom fell from him, and he grew radiant.

“Don’t! Don’t” she cried. “You mustn’t—”

“I won’t tell him,” said Sheridan, from the doorway. “I won’t tell anybody anything!”

There was a heavy town-fog that afternoon, a smoke-mist, densest in the sanctuary of the temple. The people went about in it, busy and dirty, thickening their outside and inside linings of coal-tar, asphalt, sulphurous acid, oil of vitriol, and the other familiar things the men liked to breathe and to have upon their skins and garments and upon their wives and babies and sweethearts. The growth of the city was visible in the smoke and the noise and the rush. There was more smoke than there had been this day of February a year earlier; there was more noise; and the crowds were thicker—yet quicker in spite of that. The traffic policeman had a hard time, for the people were independent—they retained some habits of the old market-town period, and would cross the street anywhere and anyhow, which not only got them killed more frequently than if they clung to the legal crossings, but kept the motormen, the chauffeurs, and the truck-drivers in a stew of profane nervousness. So the traffic policemen led harried lives; they themselves were killed, of course, with a certain periodicity, but their main trouble was that they could not make the citizens realize that it was actually and mortally perilous to go about their city. It was strange, for there were probably no citizens of any length of residence who had not personally known either some one who had been killed or injured in an accident, or some one who had accidentally killed or injured others. And yet, perhaps it was not strange, seeing the sharp preoccupation of the faces—the people had something on their minds; they could not stop to bother about dirt and danger.

Mary Vertrees was not often down-town; she had never seen an accident until this afternoon. She had come upon errands for her mother connected with a timorous refurbishment; and as she did these, in and out of the department stores, she had an insistent consciousness of the Sheridan Building. From the street, anywhere, it was almost always in sight, like some monstrous geometrical shadow, murk-colored and rising limitlessly into the swimming heights of the smoke-mist. It was gaunt and grimy and repellent; it had nothing but strength and size—but in that consciousness of Mary’s the great structure may have partaken of beauty. Sheridan had made some of the things he said emphatic enough to remain with her. She went over and over them—and they began to seem true: “Only ONE girl he could feel THAT sorry for!” “Gurney says he’s got you on his brain so bad—” The man’s clumsy talk began to sing in her heart. The song was begun there when she saw the accident.

She was directly opposite the Sheridan Building then, waiting for the traffic to thin before she crossed, though other people were risking the passage, darting and halting and dodging parlously. Two men came from the crowd behind her, talking earnestly, and started across. Both wore black; one was tall and broad and thick, and the other was taller, but noticeably slender. And Mary caught her breath, for they were Bibbs and his father. They did not see her, and she caught a phrase in Bibbs’s mellow voice, which had taken a crisper ring: “Sixty-eight thousand dollars? Not sixty-eight thousand buttons!” It startled her queerly, and as there was a glimpse of his profile she saw for the first time a resemblance to his father.

She watched them. In the middle of the street Bibbs had to step ahead of his father, and the two were separated. But the reckless passing of a truck, beyond the second line of rails, frightened a group of country women who were in course of passage; they were just in front of Bibbs, and shoved backward upon him violently. To extricate himself from them he stepped back, directly in front of a moving trolley-car—no place for absent-mindedness, but Bibbs was still absorbed in thoughts concerned with what he had been saying to his father. There were shrieks and yells; Bibbs looked the wrong way—and then Mary saw the heavy figure of Sheridan plunge straight forward in front of the car. With absolute disregard of his own life, he hurled himself at Bibbs like a football-player shunting off an opponent, and to Mary it seemed that they both went down together. But that was all she could see—automobiles, trucks, and wagons closed in between. She made out that the trolley-car stopped jerkily, and she saw a policeman breaking his way through the instantly condensing crowd, while the traffic came to a standstill, and people stood up in automobiles or climbed upon the hubs and tires of wheels, not to miss a chance of seeing anything horrible.

Mary tried to get through; it was impossible. Other policemen came to help the first, and in a minute or two the traffic was in motion again. The crowd became pliant, dispersing—there was no figure upon the ground, and no ambulance came. But one of the policemen was detained by the clinging and beseeching of a gloved hand.

“What IS the matter, lady?”

“Where are they?” Mary cried.

“Who? Ole man Sheridan? I reckon HE wasn’t much hurt!”

“His SON—”

“Was that who the other one was? I seen him knock him—oh, he’s not bad off, I guess, lady. The ole man got him out of the way all right. The fender shoved the ole man around some, but I reckon he only got shook up. They both went on in the Sheridan Building without any help. Excuse me, lady.”

Sheridan and Bibbs, in fact, were at that moment in the elevator, ascending. “Whisk-broom up in the office,” Sheridan was saying. “You got to look out on those corners nowadays, I tell you. I don’t know I got any call to blow, though—because I tried to cross after you did. That’s how I happened to run into you. Well, you want to remember to look out after this. We were talkin’ about Murtrie’s askin’ sixty-eight thousand flat for that ninety-nine-year lease. It’s his lookout if he’d rather take it that way, and I don’t know but—”

“No,” said Bibbs, emphatically, as the elevator stopped; “he won’t get it. Not from us, he won’t, and I’ll show you why. I can convince you in five minutes.” He followed his father into the office anteroom—and convinced him. Then, having been diligently brushed by a youth of color, Bibbs went into his own room and closed the door.

He was more shaken than he had allowed his father to perceive, and his side was sore where Sheridan had struck him. He desired to be alone; he wanted to rub himself and, for once, to do some useless thinking again. He knew that his father had not “happened” to run into him; he knew that Sheridan had instantly—and instinctively— proved that he held his own life of no account whatever compared to that of his son and heir. Bibbs had been unable to speak of that, or to seem to know it; for Sheridan, just as instinctively, had swept the matter aside—as of no importance, since all was well —reverting immediately to business.

Bibbs began to think intently of his father. He perceived, as he had never perceived before, the shadowing of something enormous and indomitable—and lawless; not to be daunted by the will of nature’s very self; laughing at the lightning and at wounds and mutilation; conquering, irresistible—and blindly noble. For the first time in his life Bibbs began to understand the meaning of being truly this man’s son.

He would be the more truly his son henceforth, though, as Sheridan said, Bibbs had not come down-town with him meanly or half-heartedly. He had given his word because he had wanted the money, simply, for Mary Vertrees in her need. And he shivered with horror of himself, thinking how he had gone to her to offer it, asking her to marry him —with his head on his breast in shameful fear that she would accept him! He had not known her; the knowing had lost her to him, and this had been his real awakening; for he knew now how deep had been that slumber wherein he dreamily celebrated the superiority of “friendship”! The sleep-walker had wakened to bitter knowledge of love and life, finding himself a failure in both. He had made a burnt offering of his dreams, and the sacrifice had been an unforgivable hurt to Mary. All that was left for him was the work he had not chosen, but at least he would not fail in that, though it was indeed no more than “dust in his mouth.” If there had been anything “to work for—”

He went to the window, raised it, and let in the uproar of the streets below. He looked down at the blurred, hurrying swarms and he looked across, over the roofs with their panting jets of vapor, into the vast, foggy heart of the smoke. Dizzy traceries of steel were rising dimly against it, chattering with steel on steel, and screeching in steam, while tiny figures of men walked on threads in the dull sky. Buildings would overtop the Sheridan. Bigness was being served.