The Turmoil, A Novel
by
Booth Tarkington
Part 1 out of 6
The Turmoil. A novel by Booth Tarkington
1915.
To Laurel.
There is a midland city in the heart of fair, open country, a dirty
and wonderful city nesting dingily in the fog of its own smoke. The
stranger must feel the dirt before he feels the wonder, for the dirt
will be upon him instantly. It will be upon him and within him, since
he must breathe it, and he may care for no further proof that wealth
is here better loved than cleanliness; but whether he cares or not,
the negligently tended streets incessantly press home the point, and
so do the flecked and grimy citizens. At a breeze he must smother in
the whirlpools of dust, and if he should decline at any time to inhale
the smoke he has the meager alternative of suicide.
The smoke is like the bad breath of a giant panting for more and more
riches. He gets them and pants the fiercer, smelling and swelling
prodigiously. He has a voice, a hoarse voice, hot and rapacious
trained to one tune: "Wealth! I will get Wealth! I will make
Wealth! I will sell Wealth for more Wealth! My house shall be dirty,
my garment shall be dirty, and I will foul my neighbor so that he
cannot be clean--but I will get Wealth! There shall be no clean thing
about me: my wife shall be dirty and my child shall be dirty, but I
will get Wealth!" And yet it is not wealth that he is so greedy for:
what the giant really wants is hasty riches. To get these he
squanders wealth upon the four winds, for wealth is in the smoke.
Not so long ago as a generation, there was no panting giant here, no
heaving, grimy city; there was but a pleasant big town of neighborly
people who had understanding of one another, being, on the whole, much
of the same type. It was a leisurely and kindly place--"homelike,"
it was called--and when the visitor had been taken through the State
Asylum for the Insane and made to appreciate the view of the cemetery
from a little hill, his host's duty as Baedeker was done. The good
burghers were given to jogging comfortably about in phaetons or in
surreys for a family drive on Sunday. No one was very rich; few were
very poor; the air was clean, and there was time to live.
But there was a spirit abroad in the land, and it was strong here as
elsewhere--a spirit that had moved in the depths of the American soil
and labored there, sweating, till it stirred the surface, rove the
mountains, and emerged, tangible and monstrous, the god of all good
American hearts--Bigness. And that god wrought the panting giant.
In the souls of the burghers there had always been the profound
longing for size. Year by year the longing increased until it became
an accumulated force: We must Grow! We must be Big! We must be
Bigger! Bigness means Money! And the thing began to happen; their
longing became a mighty Will. We must be Bigger! Bigger! Bigger!
Get people here! Coax them here! Bribe them! Swindle them into
coming, if you must, but get them! Shout them into coming! Deafen
them into coming! Any kind of people; all kinds of people! We must
be Bigger! Blow! Boost! Brag! Kill the fault-finder! Scream and
bellow to the Most High: Bigness is patriotism and honor! Bigness
is love and life and happiness! Bigness is Money! We want Bigness!
They got it. From all the states the people came; thinly at first,
and slowly, but faster and faster in thicker and thicker swarms as the
quick years went by. White people came, and black people and brown
people and yellow people; the negroes came from the South by the
thousands and thousands, multiplying by other thousands and thousands
faster than they could die. From the four quarters of the earth the
people came, the broken and the unbroken, the tame and the wild--
Germans, Irish, Italians, Hungarians, Scotch, Welsh, English, French,
Swiss, Swedes, Norwegians, Greeks, Poles, Russian Jews, Dalmatians,
Armenians, Rumanians, Servians, Persians, Syrians, Japanese, Chinese,
Turks, and every hybrid that these could propagate. And if there
were no Eskimos nor Patagonians, what other human strain that earth
might furnish failed to swim and bubble in this crucible?
With Bigness came the new machinery and the rush; the streets began
to roar and rattle, the houses to tremble; the pavements were worn
under the tread of hurrying multitudes. The old, leisurely, quizzical
look of the faces was lost in something harder and warier; and a
cockney type began to emerge discernibly--a cynical young mongrel
barbaric of feature, muscular and cunning; dressed in good fabrics
fashioned apparently in imitation of the sketches drawn by newspaper
comedians. The female of his kind came with him--a pale girl, shoddy
and a little rouged; and they communicated in a nasal argot, mainly
insolences and elisions. Nay, the common speech of the people showed
change: in place of the old midland vernacular, irregular but clean,
and not unwholesomely drawling, a jerky dialect of coined metaphors
began to be heard, held together by GUNNAS and GOTTAS and much
fostered by the public journals.
The city piled itself high in the center, tower on tower for a
nucleus, and spread itself out over the plain, mile after mile; and
in its vitals, like benevolent bacilli contending with malevolent in
the body of a man, missions and refuges offered what resistance they
might to the saloons and all the hells that cities house and shelter.
Temptation and ruin were ready commodities on the market for purchase
by the venturesome; highwaymen walked the streets at night and
sometimes killed; snatching thieves were busy everywhere in the dusk;
while house-breakers were a common apprehension and frequent reality.
Life itself was somewhat safer from intentional destruction than it
was in medieval Rome during a faction war--though the Roman murderer
was more like to pay for his deed--but death or mutilation beneath
the wheels lay in ambush at every crossing.
The politicians let the people make all the laws they liked; it did
not matter much, and the taxes went up, which is good for politicians.
Law-making was a pastime of the people; nothing pleased them more.
Singular fermentation of their humor, they even had laws forbidding
dangerous speed. More marvelous still, they had a law forbidding
smoke! They forbade chimneys to smoke and they forbade cigarettes
to smoke. They made laws for all things and forgot them immediately;
though sometimes they would remember after a while, and hurry to make
new laws that the old laws should be enforced--and then forget both
new and old. Wherever enforcement threatened Money or Votes--or
wherever it was too much to bother--it became a joke. Influence was
the law.
So the place grew. And it grew strong. Straightway when he came,
each man fell to the same worship:
Give me of thyself, O Bigness:
Power to get more power!
Riches to get more riches!
Give me of thy sweat that I may sweat more!
Give me Bigness to get more Bigness to myself,
O Bigness, for Thine is the Power and the Glory!
And there is no end but Bigness, ever and for ever!
The Sheridan Building was the biggest skyscraper; the Sheridan Trust
Company was the biggest of its kind, and Sheridan himself had been the
biggest builder and breaker and truster and buster under the smoke.
He had come from a country cross-roads, at the beginning of the
growth, and he had gone up and down in the booms and relapses of
that period; but each time he went down he rebounded a little higher,
until finally, after a year of overwork and anxiety--the latter not
decreased by a chance, remote but possible, of recuperation from
the former in the penitentiary--he found himself on top, with solid
substance under his feet; and thereafter "played it safe." But his
hunger to get was unabated, for it was in the very bones of him and
grew fiercer.
He was the city incarnate. He loved it, calling it God's country, as
he called the smoke Prosperity, breathing the dingy cloud with relish.
And when soot fell upon his cuff he chuckled; he could have kissed it.
"It's good! It's good!" he said, and smacked his lips in gusto.
"Good, clean soot; it's our life-blood, God bless it!" The smoke was
one of his great enthusiasms; he laughed at a committee of plaintive
housewives who called to beg his aid against it. "Smoke's what brings
your husbands' money home on Saturday night," he told them, jovially.
"Smoke may hurt your little shrubberies in the front yard some, but
it's the catarrhal climate and the adenoids that starts your chuldern
coughing. Smoke makes the climate better. Smoke means good health:
it makes the people wash more. They have to wash so much they wash
off the microbes. You go home and ask your husbands what smoke puts
in their pockets out o' the pay-roll--and you'll come around next time
to get me to turn out more smoke instead o' chokin' it off!"
It was Narcissism in him to love the city so well; he saw his
reflection in it; and, like it, he was grimy, big, careless, rich,
strong, and unquenchably optimistic. From the deepest of his inside
all the way out he believed it was the finest city in the world.
"Finest" was his word. He thought of it as his city as he thought
of his family as his family; and just as profoundly believed his city
to be the finest city in the world, so did he believe his family to
be--in spite of his son Bibbs--the finest family in the world. As a
matter of fact, he knew nothing worth knowing about either.
Bibbs Sheridan was a musing sort of boy, poor in health, and
considered the failure--the "odd one"--of the family. Born during
that most dangerous and anxious of the early years, when the mother
fretted and the father took his chance, he was an ill-nourished baby,
and grew meagerly, only lengthwise, through a feeble childhood. At
his christening he was committed for life to "Bibbs" mainly through
lack of imagination on his mother's part, for though it was her maiden
name, she had no strong affection for it; but it was "her turn" to
name the baby, and, as she explained later, she "couldn't think of
anything else she liked AT ALL!" She offered this explanation one
day when the sickly boy was nine and after a long fit of brooding had
demanded some reason for his name's being Bibbs. He requested then
with unwonted vehemence to be allowed to exchange names with his older
brother, Roscoe Conkling Sheridan, or with the oldest, James Sheridan,
Junior, and upon being refused went down into the cellar and remained
there the rest of that day. And the cook, descending toward dusk,
reported that he had vanished; but a search revealed that he was in
the coal-pile, completely covered and still burrowing. Removed by
force and carried upstairs, he maintained a cryptic demeanor, refusing
to utter a syllable of explanation, even under the lash. This obvious
thing was wholly a mystery to both parents; the mother was nonplussed,
failed to trace and connect; and the father regarded his son as a
stubborn and mysterious fool, an impression not effaced as the years
went by.
At twenty-two, Bibbs was physically no more than the outer scaffolding
of a man, waiting for the building to begin inside--a long-shanked,
long-faced, rickety youth, sallow and hollow and haggard, dark-haired
and dark-eyed, with a peculiar expression of countenance; indeed, at
first sight of Bibbs Sheridan a stranger might well be solicitous, for
he seemed upon the point of tears. But to a slightly longer gaze, not
grief, but mirth, was revealed as his emotion; while a more searching
scrutiny was proportionately more puzzling--he seemed about to burst
out crying or to burst out laughing, one or the other, inevitably, but
it was impossible to decide which. And Bibbs never, on any occassion
of his life, either laughed aloud or wept.
He was a "disappointment" to his father. At least that was the
parent's word--a confirmed and established word after his first
attempt to make a "business man" of the boy. He sent Bibbs to "begin
at the bottom and learn from the ground up" in the machine-shop of the
Sheridan Automatic Pump Works, and at the end of six months the family
physician sent Bibbs to begin at the bottom and learn from the ground
up in a sanitarium.
"You needn't worry, mamma," Sheridan told his wife. "There's nothin'
the matter with Bibbs except he hates work so much it makes him sick.
I put him in the machine-shop, and I guess I know what I'm doin' about
as well as the next man. Ole Doc Gurney always was one o' them nutty
alarmists. Does he think I'd do anything 'd be bad for my own flesh
and blood? He makes me tired!"
Anything except perfectly definite health or perfectly definite
disease was incomprehensible to Sheridan. He had a genuine
conviction that lack of physical persistence in any task involving
money must be due to some subtle weakness of character itself, to
some profound shiftlessness or slyness. He understood typhoid fever,
pheumonia, and appendicitis--one had them, and either died or got over
them and went back to work--but when the word "nervous" appeared in a
diagnosis he became honestly suspicious: he had the feeling that there
was something contemptible about it, that there was a nigger in the
wood-pile somewhere.
"Look at me," he said. "Look at what I did at his age! Why, when
I was twenty years old, wasn't I up every morning at four o'clock
choppin' wood--yes! and out in the dark and the snow--to build a fire
in a country grocery store? And here Bibbs has to go and have a
DOCTOR because he can't--Pho! it makes me tired! If he'd gone at it
like a man he wouldn't be sick."
He paced the bedroom--the usual setting for such parental discussions
--in his nightgown, shaking his big, grizzled head and gesticulating
to his bedded spouse. "My Lord!" he said. "If a little, teeny bit
o' work like this is too much for him, why, he ain't fit for anything!
It's nine-tenths imagination, and the rest of it--well, I won't say
it's deliberate, but I WOULD like to know just how much of it's put
on!"
"Bibbs didn't want the doctor," said Mrs. Sheridan. "It was when
he was here to dinner that night, and noticed how he couldn't eat
anything. Honey, you better come to bed."
"Eat!" he snorted. "Eat! It's work that makes men eat! And it's
imagination that keeps people from eatin'. Busy men don't get time
for that kind of imagination; and there's another thing you'll notice
about good health, if you'll take the trouble to look around you
Mrs. Sheridan: busy men haven't got time to be sick and they don't
GET sick. You just think it over and you'll find that ninety-nine
per cent. of the sick people you know are either women or loafers.
Yes, ma'am!"
"Honey," she said again, drowsily, "you better come to bed."
"Look at the other boys," her husband bade her. "Look at Jim and
Roscoe. Look at how THEY work! There isn't a shiftless bone in their
bodies. Work never made Jim or Roscoe sick. Jim takes half the load
off my shoulders already. Right now there isn't a harder-workin',
brighter business man in this city than Jim. I've pushed him, but
he give me something to push AGAINST. You can't push 'nervous
dyspepsia'! And look at Roscoe; just LOOK at what that boy's done for
himself, and barely twenty-seven years old--married, got a fine wife,
and ready to build for himself with his own money, when I put up the
New House for you and Edie."
"Papa, you'll catch cold in your bare feet," she murmured. "You
better come to bed."
"And I'm just as proud of Edie, for a girl," he continued,
emphatically, "as I am of Jim and Roscoe for boys. She'll make some
man a mighty good wife when the time comes. She's the prettiest and
talentedest girl in the United States! Look at that poem she wrote
when she was in school and took the prize with; it's the best poem I
ever read in my life, and she'd never even tried to write one before.
It's the finest thing I ever read, and R. T. Bloss said so, too; and
I guess he's a good enough literary judge for me-- turns out more
advertisin' liter'cher than any man in the city. I tell you she's
smart! Look at the way she worked me to get me to promise the New
House--and I guess you had your finger in that, too, mamma! This old
shack's good enough for me, but you and little Edie 'll have to have
your way. I'll get behind her and push her the same as I will Jim
and Roscoe. I tell you I'm mighty proud o' them three chuldern! But
Bibbs--" He paused, shaking his head. "Honest, mamma, when I talk
to men that got ALL their boys doin' well and worth their salt, why,
I have to keep my mind on Jim and Roscoe and forget about Bibbs."
Mrs. Sheridan tossed her head fretfully upon the pillow. "You did the
best you could, papa," she said, impatiently, "so come to bed and quit
reproachin' yourself for it."
He glared at her indignantly. "Reproachin' myself!" he snorted.
"I ain't doin' anything of the kind! What in the name o' goodness
would I want to reproach myself for? And it wasn't the 'best I
could,' either. It was the best ANYBODY could! I was givin' him
a chance to show what was in him and make a man of himself--and here
he goes and gets 'nervous dyspepsia' on me!"
He went to the old-fashioned gas-fixture, turned out the light,
and muttered his way morosely into bed.
"What?" said his wife, crossly, bothered by a subsequent mumbling.
"More like hook-worm, I said," he explained, speaking louder. "I
don't know what to do with him!"
Beginning at the beginning and learning from the ground up was a long
course for Bibbs at the sanitarium, with milk and "zwieback" as the
basis of instruction; and the months were many and tiresome before
he was considered near enough graduation to go for a walk leaning on
a nurse and a cane. These and subsequent months saw the planning,
the building, and the completion of the New House; and it was to that
abode of Bigness that Bibbs was brought when the cane, without the
nurse, was found sufficient to his support.
Edith met him at the station. "Well, well, Bibbs!" she said, as he
came slowly through the gates, the last of all the travelers from
that train. She gave his hand a brisk little shake, averting her eyes
after a quick glance at him, and turning at once toward the passage
to the street. "Do you think they ought to've let you come? You
certainly don't look well!"
"But I certainly do look better," he returned, in a voice as slow as
his gait; a drawl that was a necessity, for when Bibbs tried to speak
quickly he stammered. "Up to about a month ago it took two people to
see me. They had to get me in a line between 'em!"
Edith did not turn her eyes directly toward him again, after her
first quick glance; and her expression, in spite of her, showed a
faint, troubled distaste, the look of a healthy person pressed by
some obligation of business to visit a "bad" ward in a hospital.
She was nineteen, fair and slim, with small, unequal features, but
a prettiness of color and a brilliancy of eyes that created a total
impression close upon beauty. Her movements were eager and restless:
there was something about her, as kind old ladies say, that was very
sweet; and there was something that was hurried and breathless. This
was new to Bibbs; it was a perceptible change since he had last seen
her, and he bent upon her a steady, whimsical scrutiny as they stood
at the curb, waiting for an automobile across the street to disengage
itself from the traffic.
"That's the new car," she said. "Everything's new. We've got four
now, besides Jim's. Roscoe's got two."
"Edith, you look--" he began, and paused.
"Oh, WE're all well," she said, briskly; and then, as if something in
his tone had caught her as significant, "Well, HOW do I look, Bibbs?"
"You look--" He paused again, taking in the full length of her--her
trim brown shoes, her scant, tapering, rough skirt, and her coat of
brown and green, her long green tippet and her mad little rough hat
in the mad mode--all suited to the October day.
"How do I look?" she insisted.
"You look," he answered, as his examination ended upon an incrusted
watch of platinum and enamel at her wrist, "you look--expensive!"
That was a substitute for what he intended to say, for her constraint
and preoccupation, manifested particularly in her keeping her direct
glance away from him, did not seem to grant the privilege of impulsive
intimacies.
"I expect I am!" she laughed, and sidelong caught the direction of
his glance. "Of course I oughtn't to wear it in the daytime--it's an
evening thing, for the theater--by my day wrist-watch is out of gear.
Bobby Lamhorn broke it yesterday; he's a regular rowdy sometimes.
Do you want Claus to help you in?"
"Oh no," said Bibbs. "I'm alive." And after a fit of panting
subsequent to his climbing into the car unaided, he added, "Of course,
I have to TELL people!"
"We only got your telegram this morning," she said, as they began to
move rapidly through the "wholesale district" neighboring the station.
"Mother said she'd hardly expected you this month."
"They seemed to be through with me up there in the country," he
explained, gently. "At least they said they were, and they wouldn't
keep me any longer, because so many really sick people wanted to get
in. They told me to go home --and I didn't have any place else to go.
It'll be all right, Edith; I'll sit in the woodshed until after dark
every day."
"Pshaw!" She laughed nervously. "Of course we're all of us glad to
have you back."
"Yes?" he said. "Father?"
"Of course! Didn't he write and tell you to come home?" She did not
turn to him with the question. All the while she rode with her face
directly forward.
"No," he said; "father hasn't written."
She flushed a little. "I expect I ought to've written sometime, or
one of the boys--"
"Oh no; that was all right."
"You can't think how busy we've all been this year, Bibbs. I often
planned to write--and then, just as I was going to, something would
turn up. And I'm sure it's been just the same way with Jim and
Roscoe. Of course we knew mamma was writing often and--"
"Of course!" he said, readily. "There's a chunk of coal fallen on
your glove, Edith. Better flick it off before it smears. My word!
I'd almost forgotten how sooty it is here."
"We've been having very bright weather this month--for us." She
blew the flake of soot into the air, seeming relieved.
He looked up at the dingy sky, wherein hung the disconsolate sun
like a cold tin pan nailed up in a smoke-house by some lunatic, for
a decoration. "Yes," said Bibbs. "It's very gay." A few moments
later, as they passed a corner, "Aren't we going home?" he asked.
"Why, yes!" Did you want to go somewhere else first?"
"No. Your new driver's taking us out of the way, isn't he?"
"No. This is right. We're going straight home."
"But we've passed the corner. We always turned--"
"Good gracious!" she cried. "Didn't you know we'd moved? Didn't
you know we were in the New House?"
"Why, no!" said Bibbs. "Are you?"
"We've been there a month! Good gracious! Didn't you know--" She
broke off, flushing again, and then went on hastily: "Of course,
mamma's never been so busy in her life; we ALL haven't had time to do
anything but keep on the hop. Mamma couldn't even come to the station
to-day. Papa's got some of his business friends and people from
around the OLD-house neighborhood coming to-night for a big dinner
and 'house-warming'--dreadful kind of people--but mamma's got it all
on her hands. She's never sat down a MINUTE; and if she did, papa
would have her up again before--"
"Of course," said Bibbs. "Do you like the new place, Edith?"
"I don't like some of the things father WOULD have in it, but it's
the finest house in town, and that ought to be good enough for me!
Papa bought one thing I like--a view of the Bay of Naples in oil
that's perfectly beautiful; it's the first thing you see as you come
in the front hall, and it's eleven feet long. But he would have that
old fruit picture we had in the Murphy Street house hung up in the
new dining-room. You remember it--a table and a watermelon sliced
open, and a lot of rouged-looking apples and some shiny lemons, with
two dead prairie-chickens on a chair? He bought it at a furniture-
store years and years ago, and he claims it's a finer picture than any
they saw in the museums, that time he took mamma to Europe. But it's
horribly out of date to have those things in dining-rooms, and I
caught Bobby Lamhorn giggling at it; and Sibyl made fun of it, too,
with Bobby, and then told papa she agreed with him about its being
such a fine thing, and said he did just right to insist on having it
where he wanted it. She makes me tired! Sibyl!"
Edith's first constraint with her brother, amounting almost to
awkwardness, vanished with this theme, though she still kept her
full gaze always to the front, even in the extreme ardor of her
denunciation of her sister-in-law.
"SIBYL!" she repeated, with such heat and vigor that the name seemed
to strike fire on her lips. "I'd like to know why Roscoe couldn't
have married somebody from HERE that would have done us some good!
He could have got in with Bobby Lamhorn years ago just as well as now,
and Bobby'd have introduced him to the nicest girls in town, but
instead of that he had to go and pick up this Sibyl Rink! I met some
awfully nice people from her town when mamma and I were at Atlantic
City, last spring, and not one had ever heard of the Rinks! Not even
HEARD of 'em!"
"I thought you were great friends with Sibyl," Bibbs said.
"Up to the time I found her out!" the sister returned, with continuing
vehemence. "I've found out some things about Mrs. Roscoe Sheridan
lately--"
"It's only lately?"
"Well--" Edith hesitated, her lips setting primly. "Of course, I
always did see that she never cared the snap of her little finger
about ROSCOE!"
"It seems," said Bibbs, in laconic protest, "that she married him."
The sister emitted a shrill cry, to be interpreted as contemptuous
laughter, and, in her emotion, spoke too impulsively: "Why, she'd
have married YOU!"
"No, no," he said; "she couldn't be that bad!"
"I didn't mean--" she began, distressed. "I only meant--I didn't
mean--"
"Never mind, Edith," he consoled her. "You see, she couldn't have
married me, because I didn't know her; and besides, if she's as
mercenary as all that she'd have been too clever. The head doctor
even had to lend me the money for my ticket home."
"I didn't mean anything unpleasant about YOU," Edith babbled. "I only
meant I thought she was the kind of girl who was so simply crazy to
marry somebody she'd have married anybody that asked her."
"Yes, yes," said Bibbs, "it's all straight." And, perceiving that
his sister's expression was that of a person whose adroitness has set
matters prefectly to rights, he chuckled silently.
"Roscoe's perfectly lovely to her," she continued, a moment later.
"Too lovely! If he'd wake up a little and lay down the law, some day,
like a MAN, I guess she'd respect him more and learn to behave
herself!"
"'Behave'?"
"Oh, well, I mean she's so insincere," said Edith, characteristically
evasive when it came to stating the very point to which she had led,
and in this not unique of her sex.
Bibbs contented himself with a non-committal gesture. "Business
is crawling up the old streets," he said, his long, tremulous hand
indicating a vasty structure in course of erection. "The boarding-
houses come first and then the--"
"That isn't for shops," she informed him. "That's a new investment
of papa's --the 'Sheridan Apartments.'"
"Well, well," he murmured. "I supposed 'Sheridan' was almost well
enough known here already."
"Oh, we're well enough known ABOUT!" she said, impatiently. "I guess
there isn't a man, woman, child, or nigger baby in town that doesn't
know who we are. But we aren't in with the right people."
"No!" he exclaimed. "Who's all that?"
"Who's all what?"
"The 'right people.'"
"You know what I mean: the best people, the old families--the people
that have the real social position in this town and that know they've
got it."
Bibbs indulged in his silent chuckle again; he seemed greatly amused.
"I thought that the people who actually had the real what-you-may-
call-it didn't know it," he said. "I've always understood that it was
very unsatisfactory, because if you thought about it you didn't have
it, and if you had it you didn't know it."
"That's just bosh," she retorted. "They know it in this town, all
right! I found out a lot of things, long before we began to think
of building out in this direction. The right people in this town
aren't always the society-column ones, and they mix around with
outsiders, and they don't all belong to any one club--they're taken
in all sorts into all their clubs--but they're a clan, just the same;
and they have the clan feeling and they're just as much We, Us and
Company as any crowd you read about anywhere in the world. Most of
'em were here long before papa came, and the grandfathers of the girls
of my age knew each other, and--"
"I see," Bibbs interrupted, gravely. "Their ancestors fled together
from many a stricken field, and Crusaders' blood flows in their veins.
I always understood the first house was built by an old party of the
name of Vertrees who couldn't get along with Dan'l Boone, and hurried
away to these parts because Dan'l wanted him to give back a gun he'd
lent him."
Edith gave a little ejaculation of alarm. "You mustn't repeat that
story, Bibbs, even if it's true. The Vertreeses are THE best family,
and of course the very oldest here; they were an old family even
before Mary Vertrees's great-great-grandfather came west and founded
this settlement. He came from Lynn, Massachusetts, and they have
relatives there YET--some of the best people in Lynn!"
"No!" exclaimed Bibbs, incredulously.
"And there are other old families like the Vertreeses," she went
on, not heeding him; "the Lamhorns and the Kittersbys and the
J. Palmerston Smiths--"
"Strange names to me," he interrupted. "Poor things! None of them
have my acquaintance."
"No, that's just it!" she cried. "And papa had never even heard the
name of Vertrees! Mrs. Vertrees went with some anti-smoke committee
to see him, and he told her that smoke was what made her husband bring
home his wages from the pay-roll on Saturday night! HE told us about
it, and I thought I just couldn't live through the night, I was so
ashamed! Mr. Vertrees has always lived on his income, and papa didn't
know him, of course. They're the stiffist, most elegant people in the
whole town. And to crown it all, papa went and bought the next lot to
the old Vertrees country mansion--it's in the very heart of the best
new residence district now, and that's where the New House is, right
next door to them--and I must say it makes their place look rather
shabby! I met Mary Vertrees when I joined the Mission Service
Helpers, but she never did any more than just barely bow to me, and
since papa's break I doubt if she'll do that! They haven't called."
"And you think if I spread this gossip about Vertrees the First
stealing Dan'l Boone's gun, the chances that they WILL call--"
"Papa knows what a break he made with Mrs. Vertrees. I made him
understand that," said Edith, demurely, "and he's promised to try
and meet Mr. Vertrees and be nice to him. It's just this way: if we
don't know THEM, it's practically no use in our having build the New
House; and if we DO know them and they're decent to us, we're right
with the right people. They can do the whole thing for us. Bobby
Lamhorn told Sibyl he was going to bring his mother to call on her
and on mamma, but it was weeks ago, and I notice he hasn't done it;
and if Mrs. Vertrees decides not to know us, I'm darn sure Mrs
Lamhorn'll never come. That's ONE thing Sibyl didn't manage! She
SAID Bobby offered to bring his mother--"
"You say he is a friend of Roscoe's?" Bibbs asked.
"Oh, he's a friend of the whole family," she returned, with a
petulance which she made an effort to disguise. "Roscoe and he got
acquainted somewhere, and they take him to the theater about every
other night. Sibyl has him to lunch, too, and keeps--" She broke
off with an angry little jerk of the head. "We can see the New House
from the second corner ahead. Roscoe has built straight across the
street from us, you know. Honestly, Sibyl makes me think of a snake,
sometimes--the way she pulls the wool over people's eyes! She honeys
up to papa and gets anything in the world she wants out of him, and
then makes fun of him behind his back--yes, and to his face, but HE
can't see it! She got him to give her a twelve-thousand-dollar porch
for their house after it was--"
"Good heavens!" said Bibbs, staring ahead as they reached the corner
and the car swung to the right, following a bend in the street.
"Is that the New House?"
"Yes. What do you think of it?"
"Well," he drawled, "I'm pretty sure the sanitarium's about half a
size bigger; I can't be certain till I measure."
And a moment later, as they entered the driveway, he added, seriously:
"But it's beautiful!"
It was gray stone, with long roofs of thick green slate. An architect
who loved the milder "Gothic motives" had built what he liked: it was
to be seen at once that he had been left unhampered, and he had
wrought a picture out of his head into a noble and exultant reality.
At the same time a landscape-designer had played so good a second,
with ready-made accessories of screen, approach and vista, that
already whatever look of newness remained upon the place was to its
advantage, as showing at least one thing yet clean under the grimy
sky. For, though the smoke was thinner in this direction, and at this
long distance from the heart of the town, it was not absent, and under
tutelage of wind and weather could be malignant even here, where cows
had wandered in the meadows and corn had been growing not ten years
gone.
Altogether, the New House was a success. It was one of those
architects' successes which leave the owners veiled in privacy;
it revealed nothing of the people who lived in it save that they
were rich. There are houses that cannot be detached from their own
people without protesting: every inch of mortar seems to mourn the
separation, and such a house--no matter what be done to it--is ever
murmurous with regret, whispering the old name sadly to itself
unceasingly. But the New House was of a kind to change hands without
emotion. In our swelling cities, great places of its type are useful
as financial gauges of the business tides; rich families, one after
another, take title and occupy such houses as fortunes rise and fall
--they mark the high tide. It was impossible to imagine a child's toy
wagon left upon a walk or driveway of the New House, and yet it was
--as Bibbs rightly called it--"beautiful."
What the architect thought of the "Golfo di Napoli," which hung in
its vast gold revel of rococo frame against the gray wood of the hall,
is to be conjectured--perhaps he had not seen it.
"Edith, did you say only eleven feet?" Bibbs panted, staring at it,
as the white-jacketed twin of a Pullman porter helped him to get out
of his overcoat.
"Eleven without the frame," she explained. "It's splendid, don't
you think? It lightens things up so. The hall was kind of gloomy
before."
"No gloom now!" said Bibbs.
"This statue in the corner is pretty, too," she remarked. "Mamma and
I bought that." And Bibbs turned at her direction to behold, amid a
grove of tubbed palms, a "life-size," black-bearded Moor, of a plastic
compositon painted with unappeasable gloss and brilliancy. Upon his
chocolate head he wore a gold turban; in his hand he held a gold-
tipped spear; and for the rest, he was red and yellow and black and
silver.
"Hallelujah!" was the sole comment of the returned wanderer, and
Edith, saying she would "find mamma," left him blinking at the Moor.
Presently, after she had disappeared, he turned to the colored man who
stood waiting, Bibbs's traveling-bag in his hand. "What do YOU think
of it?" Bibbs asked, solemnly.
"Gran'!" replied the servitor. "She mighty hard to dus'. Dus' git
in all 'em wrinkles. Yessuh, she mighty hard to dus'."
"I expect she must be," said Bibbs, his glance returning reflectively
to the black bull beard for a moment. "Is there a place anywhere
I could lie down?"
"Yessuh. We got one nem spare rooms all fix up fo' you, suh. Right
up staihs, suh. Nice room."
He led the way, and Bibbs followed slowly, stopping at intervals to
rest, and noting a heavy increase in the staff of service since the
exodus from the "old" house. Maids and scrubwomen were at work under
the patently nominal direction of another Pullman porter, who was
profoundly enjoying his own affectation of being harassed with care.
"Ev'ything got look spick an' span fo' the big doin's to-night,"
Bibbs's guide explained, chuckling. "Yessuh, we got big doin's
to-night! Big doin's!"
The room to which he conducted his lagging charge was furnished
in every particular like a room in a new hotel; and Bibbs found it
pleasant--though, indeed, any room with a good bed would have seemed
pleasant to him after his journey. He stretched himself flat
immediately, and having replied "Not now" to the attendant's offer
to unpack the bag, closed his eyes wearily.
White-jacket, racially sympathetic, lowered the window-shades and made
an exit on tiptoe, encountering the other white-jacket--the harassed
overseer--in the hall without. Said the emerging one: "He mighty
shaky, Mist' Jackson. Drop right down an' shet his eyes. Eyelids all
black. Rich folks gotta go same as anybody else. Anybody ast me if
I change 'ith 'at ole boy--No, suh! Le'm keep 'is money; I keep my
black skin an' keep out the ground!"
Mr. Jackson expressed the same preference. "Yessuh, he look tuh me
like somebody awready laid out," he concluded. And upon the stairway
landing, near by, two old women, on all-fours at their work, were
likewise pessimistic.
"Hech!" said one, lamenting in a whisper. "It give me a turn to see
him go by--white as wax an' bony as a dead fish! Mrs. Cronin, tell
me: d'it make ye kind o' sick to look at um?"
"Sick? No more than the face of a blessed angel already in heaven!"
"Well," said the other, "I'd a b'y o' me own come home t' die once--"
She fell silent at a rustling of skirts in the corridor above them.
It was Mrs. Sheridan hurrying to greet her son.
She was one of those fat, pink people who fade and contract with age
like drying fruit; and her outside was a true portrait of her. Her
husband and her daughter had long ago absorbed her. What intelligence
she had was given almost wholly to comprehending and serving those
two, and except in the presence of one of them she was nearly always
absent-minded. Edith lived all day with her mother, as daughters do;
and Sheridan so held his wife to her unity with him that she had long
ago become unconscious of her existence as a thing separate from his.
She invariably perceived his moods, and nursed him through them when
she did not share them; and she gave him a profound sympathy with the
inmost spirit and purpose of his being, even though she did not
comprehend it and partook of it only as a spectator. They had known
but one actual altercation in their lives, and that was thirty years
past, in the early days of Sheridan's struggle, when, in order to
enhance the favorable impression he believed himself to be making upon
some capitalists, he had thought it necessary to accompany them to a
performance of "The Black Crook." But she had not once referred to
this during the last ten years.
Mrs. Sheridan's manner was hurried and inconsequent; her clothes
rustled more than other women's clothes; she seemed to wear too many
at a time and to be vaguely troubled by them, and she was patting
a skirt down over some unruly internal dissension at the moment she
opened Bibbs's door.
At sight of the recumbent figure she began to close the door softly,
withdrawing, but the young man had heard the turning of the knob and
the rustling of skirts, and he opened his eyes.
"Don't go, mother," he said. "I'm not asleep." He swung his long
legs over the side of the bed to rise, but she set a hand on his
shoulder, restraining him; and he lay flat again.
"No," she said, bending over to kiss his cheek, "I just come for
a minute, but I want to see how you seem. Edith said--"
"Poor Edith!" he murmured. "She couldn't look at me. She--"
"Nonsense!" Mrs. Sheridan, having let in the light at a window, came
back to the bedside. "You look a great deal better than what you did
before you went to the sanitarium, anyway. It's done you good; a body
can see that right away. You need fatting up, of course, and you
haven't got much color--"
"No," he said, "I haven't much color."
"But you will have when you get your strength back."
"Oh yes!" he responded, cheerfully. "THEN I will."
"You look a great deal better than what I expected."
"Edith must have a great vocabulary!" he chuckled.
"She's too sensitive," said Mrs. Sheridan, "and it makes her
exaggerate a little. What about your diet?"
"That's all right. They told me to eat anything."
"Anything at all?"
"Well--anything I could."
"That's good," she said, nodding. "They mean for you just to build up
your strength. That's what they told me the last time I went to see
you at the sanitarium. You look better than what you did then, and
that's only a little time ago. How long was it?"
"Eight months, I think."
"No, it couldn't be. I know it ain't THAT long, but maybe it was
longer'n I thought. And this last month or so I haven't had scarcely
even time to write more than just a line to ask how you were gettin'
along, but I told Edith to write, the weeks I couldn't, and I asked
Jim to, too, and they both said they would, so I suppose you've kept
up pretty well on the home news."
"Oh yes."
"What I think you need," said the mother, gravely, "is to liven up
a little and take an interest in things. That's what papa was sayin'
this morning, after we got your telegram; and that's what'll stimilate
your appetite, too. He was talkin' over his plans for you--"
"Plans?" Bibbs, turning on his side, shielded his eyes from the light
with his hand, so that he might see her better. "What--" He paused.
"What plans is he making for me, mother?"
She turned away, going back to the window to draw down the shade.
"Well, you better talk it over with HIM," she said, with perceptible
nervousness. "He better tell you himself. I don't feel as if I had
any call, exactly, to go into it; and you better get to sleep now,
anyway." She came and stood by the bedside once more. "But you must
remember, Bibbs, whatever papa does is for the best. He loves his
chuldern and wants to do what's right by ALL of 'em--and you'll always
find he's right in the end."
He made a little gesture of assent, which seemed to content her; and
she rustled to the door, turning to speak again after she had opened
it. "You get a good nap, now, so as to be all rested up for
to-night."
"You--you mean--he--" Bibbs stammered, having begun to speak too
quickly. Checking himself, he drew a long breath, then asked,
quietly, "Does father expect me to come down-stairs this evening?"
"Well, I think he does," she answered. "You see, it's the 'house-
warming,' as he calls it, and he said he thinks all our chuldern ought
to be around us, as well as the old friends and other folks. It's
just what he thinks you need--to take an interest and liven up. You
don't feel too bad to come down, do you?"
"Mother?"
"Well?"
"Take a good look at me," he said.
"Oh, see here!" she cried, with brusque cheerfulness. "You're not so
bad off as you think you are, Bibbs. You're on the mend; and it won't
do you any harm to please your--"
"It isn't that," he interrupted. "Honestly, I'm only afraid it might
spoil somebody's appetite. Edith--"
"I told you the child was too sensitive," she interrupted, in turn.
"You're a plenty good-lookin' enough young man for anybody! You look
like you been through a long spell and begun to get well, and that's
all there is to it."
"All right. I'll come to the party. If the rest of you can stand it,
I can!"
"It 'll do you good," she returned, rustling into the hall. "Now take
a nap, and I'll send one o' the help to wake you in time for you to
get dressed up before dinner. You go to sleep right away, now,
Bibbs!"
Bibbs was unable to obey, though he kept his eyes closed. Something
she had said kept running in his mind, repeating itself over and over
interminably. "His plans for you--his plans for you--his plans for
you--his plans for you--" And then, taking the place of "his plans
for you," after what seemed a long, long while, her flurried voice
came back to him insistently, seeming to whisper in his ear: "He
loves his chuldern--he loves his chuldern--he loves his chuldern"--
"you'll find he's always right--you'll find he's always right--"
Until at last, as he drifted into the state of half-dreams and
distorted realities, the voice seemed to murmur from beyond a great
black wing that came out of the wall and stretched over his bed--it
was a black wing within the room, and at the same time it was a black
cloud crossing the sky, bridging the whole earth from pole to pole.
It was a cloud of black smoke, and out of the heart of it came a
flurried voice whispering over and over, "His plans for you--his plans
for you--his plans for you--" And then there was nothing.
He woke refreshed, stretched himself gingerly--as one might have a
care against too quick or too long a pull upon a frayed elastic--and,
getting to his feet, went blinking to the window and touched the shade
so that it flew up, letting in a pale sunset.
He looked out into the lemon-colored light and smiled wanly at the
next house, as Edith's grandiose phrase came to mind, "the old
Vertrees country mansion." It stood in a broad lawn which was
separated from the Sheridans' by a young hedge; and it was a big,
square, plain old box of a house with a giant salt-cellar atop for a
cupola. Paint had been spared for a long time, and no one could have
put a name to the color of it, but in spite of that the place had no
look of being out at heel, and the sward was as neatly trimmed as the
Sheridans' own.
The separating hedge ran almost beneath Bibbs's window--for this wing
of the New House extended here almost to the edge of the lot--and,
directly opposite the window, the Vertreeses' lawn had been graded so
as to make a little knoll upon which stood a small rustic "summer-
house." It was almost on a level with Bibbs's window and not thirty
feet away; and it was easy for him to imagine the present dynasty of
Vertreeses in grievous outcry when they had found this retreat ruined
by the juxtaposition of the parvenu intruder. Probably the "summer-
house" was pleasant and pretty in summer. It had the lookof a place
wherein little girls had played for a generation or so with dolls
and "housekeeping," or where a lovely old lady might come to read
something dull on warm afternoons; but now in the thin light it was
desolate, the color of dust, and hung with haggard vines which had
lost their leaves.
Bibbs looked at it with grave sympathy, probably feeling some kinship
with anything so dismantled; then he turned to a cheval-glass beside
the window and paid himself the dubious tribute of a thorough
inspection. He looked the mirror up and down, slowly, repeatedly,
but came in the end to a long and earnest scrutiny of the face.
Throughout this cryptic seance his manner was profoundly impersonal;
he had the air of an entomologist intent upon classifying a specimen,
but finally he appeared to become pessimistic. He shook his head
solemnly; then gazed again and shook his head again, and continued
to shake it slowly, in complete disapproval.
"You certainly are one horrible sight!" he said, aloud.
And at that he was instantly aware of an observer. Turning quickly,
he was vouchsafed the picture of a charming lady, framed in a rustic
aperture of the "summer-house" and staring full into his window--
straight into his eyes, too, for the infinitesimal fraction of
a second before the flashingly censorious withdrawal of her own.
Composedly, she pulled several dead twigs from a vine, the manner
of her action conveying a message or proclamation to the effect that
she was in the summer-house for the sole purpose of such-like pruning
and tending, and that no gentleman could suppose her presence there
to be due to any other purpose whatsoever, or that, being there on
that account, she had allowed her attention to wander for one instant
in the direction of things of which she was in reality unconscious.
Having pulled enough twigs to emphasize her unconsciousness--and
at the same time her disapproval--of everything in the nature of
a Sheridan or belonging to a Sheridan, she descended the knoll with
maintained composure, and sauntered toward a side-door of the country
mansion of the Vertreeses. An elderly lady, bonneted and cloaked,
opened the door and came to meet her.
"Are you ready, Mary? I've been looking for you. What were you
doing?"
"Nothing. Just looking into one of Sheridans' windows," said Mary
Vertrees. "I got caught at it."
"Mary!" cried her mother. "Just as we were going to call! Good
heavens!"
"We'll go, just the same," the daughter returned. "I suppose those
women would be glad to have us if we'd burned their house to the
ground."
"But WHO saw you?" insisted Mrs. Vertrees.
"One of the sons, I suppose he was. I believe he's insane, or
something. At least I hear they keep him in a sanitarium somewhere,
and never talk about him. He was staring at himself in a mirror and
talking to himself. Then he looked out and caught me."
"What did he--"
"Nothing, of course."
"How did he look?"
"Like a ghost in a blue suit," said Miss Vertrees, moving toward
the street and waving a white-gloved hand in farewell to her father,
who was observing them from the window of his library. "Rather tragic
and altogether impossible. Do come on, mother, and let's get it
over!"
And Mrs. Vertrees, with many misgivings, set forth with her daughter
for their gracious assault upon the New House next door.
Mr. Vertrees, having watched their departure with the air of a man
who had something at hazard upon the expedition, turned from the
window and began to pace the library thoughtfully, pending their
return. He was about sixty; a small man, withered and dry and fine,
a trim little sketch of an elderly dandy. His lambrequin mustache
--relic of a forgotten Anglomania--had been profoundly black, but
now, like his smooth hair, it was approaching an equally sheer
whiteness; and though his clothes were old, they had shapeliness
and a flavor of mode. And for greater spruceness there were some
jaunty touches; gray spats, a narrow black ribbon across the gray
waistcoat to the eye-glasses in a pocket, a fleck of color from a
button in the lapel of the black coat, labeling him the descendant
of patriot warriors.
The room was not like him, being cheerful and hideous, whereas Mr.
Vertrees was anxious and decorative. Under a mantel of imitation
black marble a merry little coal-fire beamed forth upon high
and narrow "Eastlake" bookcases with long glass doors, and upon
comfortable, incongruous furniture, and upon meaningless "woodwork"
everywhere, and upon half a dozen Landseer engravings which Mr. and
Mrs. Vertrees sometimes mentioned to each other, after thirty years
of possession, as "very fine things." They had been the first people
in town to possess Landseer engravings, and there, in art, they had
rested, but they still had a feeling that in all such matters they
were in the van; and when Mr. Vertrees discovered Landseers upon the
walls of other people's houses he thawed, as a chieftain to a trusted
follower; and if he found an edition of Bulwer Lytton accompanying
the Landseers as a final corroboration of culture, he would say,
inevitably, "Those people know good pictures and they know good
books."
The growth of the city, which might easily have made him a
millionaire, had ruined him because he had failed to understand it.
When towns begin to grow they have whims, and the whims of a town
always ruin somebody. Mr. Vertrees had been most strikingly the
somebody in this case. At about the time he bought the Landseers,
he owned, through inheritance, an office-building and a large house
not far from it, where he spent the winter; and he had a country
place--a farm of four hundred acres--where he went for the summers
to the comfortable, ugly old house that was his home now, perforce,
all the year round. If he had known how to sit still and let things
happen he would have prospered miraculously; but, strangely enough,
the dainty little man was one of the first to fall down and worship
Bigness, the which proceeded straightway to enact the role of
Juggernaut for his better education. He was a true prophet of the
prodigious growth, but he had a fatal gift for selling good and buying
bad. He should have stayed at home and looked at his Landseers and
read his Bulwer, but he took his cow to market, and the trained
milkers milked her dry and then ate her. He sold the office-building
and the house in town to buy a great tract of lots in a new suburb;
then he sold the farm, except the house and the ground about it, to
pay the taxes on the suburban lots and to "keep them up." The lots
refused to stay up; but he had to do something to keep himself and his
family up, so in despair he sold the lots (which went up beautifully
the next year) for "traction stock" that was paying dividends; and
thereafter he ceased to buy and sell. Thus he disappeared altogether
from the commercial surface at about the time James Sheridan came out
securely on top; and Sheridan, until Mrs. Vertrees called upon him
with her "anti-smoke" committee, had never heard the name.
Mr. Vertrees, pinched, retired to his Landseers, and Mrs. Vertrees
"managed somehow" on the dividends, though "managing" became more and
more difficult as the years went by and money bought less and less.
But there came a day when three servitors of Bigness in Philadelphia
took greedy counsel with four fellow-worshipers from New York, and
not long after that there were no more dividends for Mr. Vertrees.
In fact, there was nothing for Mr. Vertrees, because the "traction
stock" henceforth was no stock at all, and he had mortgaged his house
long ago to help "manage somehow" according to his conception of his
"position in life"--one of his own old-fashioned phrases. Six months
before the completion of the New House next door, Mr. Vertrees had
sold his horses and the worn Victoria and "station-wagon," to pay the
arrears of his two servants and re-establish credit at the grocer's
and butcher's--and a pair of elderly carriage-horses with such
accoutrements are not very ample barter, in these days, for six
months' food and fuel and service. Mr. Vertrees had discovered, too,
that there was no salary for him in all the buzzing city--he could do
nothing.
It may be said that he was at the end of his string. Such times do
come in all their bitterness, finally, to the man with no trade or
craft, if his feeble clutch on that slippery ghost, Property, shall
fail.
The windows grew black while he paced the room, and smoky twilight
closed round about the house, yet not more darkly than what closed
round about the heart of the anxious little man patrolling the
fan-shaped zone of firelight. But as the mantel clock struck wheezily
six there was the rattle of an outer door, and a rich and beautiful
peal of laughter went ringing through the house. Thus cheerfully did
Mary Vertrees herald her return with her mother from their expedition
among the barbarians.
She came rushing into the library and threw herself into a deep chair
by the hearth, laughing so uncontrollably that tears were in her eyes.
Mrs. Vertrees followed decorously, no mirth about her; on the
contrary, she looked vaguely disturbed, as if she had eaten something
not quite certain to agree with her, and regretted it.
"Papa! Oh, oh!" And Miss Vertrees was fain to apply a handkerchief
upon her eyes. "I'm SO glad you made us go! I wouldn't have missed
it--"
Mrs. Vertrees shook her head. "I suppose I'm very dull," she said,
gently. "I didn't see anything amusing. They're most ordinary, and
the house is altogether in bad taste, but we anticipated that, and--"
"Papa!" Mary cried, breaking in. "They asked us to DINNER!"
"What!"
"And I'm GOING!" she shouted, and was seized with fresh paroxysms.
"Think of it! Never in their house before; never met any of them
but the daughter--and just BARELY met her--"
"What about you?" interrrupted Mr. Vertrees, turning sharply upon
his wife.
She made a little face as if positive now that what she had eaten
would not agree with her. "I couldn't!" she said. "I--"
"Yes, that's just--just the way she--she looked when they asked her!"
cried Mary, choking. "And then she--she realized it, and tried to
turn it into a cough, and she didn't know how, and it sounded like
--like a squeal!"
"I suppose," said Mrs. Vertrees, much injured, "that Mary will have
an uproarious time at my funeral. She makes fun of--"
Mary jumped up instantly and kissed her; then she went to the mantel
and, leaning an elbow upon it, gazed thoughtfully at the buckle of
her shoe, twinkling in the firelight.
"THEY didn't notice anything," she said. "So far as they were
concerned, mamma, it was one of the finest coughs you ever coughed."
"Who were 'they'?" asked her father. "Whom did you see?"
"Only the mother and daughter," Mary answered. "Mrs. Sheridan is
dumpy and rustly; and Miss Sheridan is pretty and pushing--dresses by
the fashion magazines and talks about New York people that have their
pictures in 'em. She tutors the mother, but not very successfully--
partly because her own foundation is too flimsy and partly because
she began too late. They've got an enormous Moor of painted plaster
or something in the hall, and the girl evidently thought it was to
her credit that she selected it!"
"They have oil-paintings, too," added Mrs. Vertrees, with a glance of
gentle price at the Landseers. "I've always thought oil-paintings in
a private house the worst of taste."
"Oh, if one owned a Raphael or a Titian!" said Mr. Vertrees, finishing
the implication, not in words, but with a wave of his hand. "Go on,
Mary. None of the rest of them came in? You didn't meet Mr. Sheridan
or--" He paused and adjusted a lump of coal in the fire delicately
with the poker. "Or one of the sons?"
Mary's glance crossed his, at that, with a flash of utter
comprehension. He turned instantly away, but she had begun to
laugh again.
"No," she said, "no one except the women, but mamma inquired about
the sons thoroughly!"
"Mary!" Mrs. Vertrees protested.
"Oh, most adroitly, too!" laughed the girl. "Only she couldn't help
unconsciously turning to look at me--when she did it!"
"Mary Vertrees!"
"Never mind, mamma! Mrs. Sheridan and Miss Sheridan neither of THEM
could help unconsciously turning to look at me--speculatively--at the
same time! They all three kept looking at me and talking about the
oldest son, Mr. James Sheridan, Junior. Mrs. Sheridan said his father
is very anxious 'to get Jim to marry and settle down,' and she assured
me that 'Jim is right cultivated.' Another of the sons, the youngest
one, caught me looking in the window this afternoon; but they didn't
seem to consider him quite one of themselves, somehow, though Mrs.
Sheridan mentioned that a couple of years or so ago he had been 'right
sick,' and had been to some cure or other. They seemed relieved to
bring the subject back to 'Jim' and his virtues--and to look at me!
The other brother is the middle one, Roscoe; he's the one that owns
the new house across the street, where that young black-sheep of
the Lamhorns, Robert, goes so often. I saw a short, dark young man
standing on the porch with Robert Lamhorn there the other day, so I
suppose that was Roscoe. 'Jim' still lurks in the mists, but I shall
meet him to-night. Papa--" She stepped nearer to him so that he had
to face her, and his eyes were troubled as he did. There may have
been a trouble deep within her own, but she kept their surface merry
with laughter. "Papa, Bibbs is the youngest one's name, and Bibbs
--to the best of our information--is a lunatic. Roscoe is married.
Papa, does it have to be Jim?"
"Mary!" Mrs. Vertrees cried, sharply. "You're outrageous! That's
a perfectly horrible way of talking!"
"Well, I'm close to twenty-four," said Mary, turning to her. "I
haven't been able to like anybody yet that's asked me to marry him,
and maybe I never shall. Until a year or so ago I've had everything
I ever wanted in my life--you and papa gave it all to me--and it's
about time I began to pay back. Unfortunately, I don't know how to
do anything--but something's got to be done."
"But you needn't talk of it like THAT!" insisted the mother,
plaintively. "It's not--it's not--"
"No, it's not," said Mary. "I know that!"
"How did they happen to ask you to dinner?" Mr. Vertrees inquired,
uneasily. "'Stextrawdn'ry thing!"
"Climbers' hospitality," Mary defined it. "We were so very cordial
and easy! I think Mrs. Sheridan herself might have done it just as
any kind old woman on a farm might ask a neighbor, but it was Miss
Sheridan who did it. She played around it awhile; you could see she
wanted to--she's in a dreadful hurry to get into things--and I fancied
she had an idea it might impress that Lamhorn boy to find us there
to-night. It's a sort of house-warming dinner, and they talked about
it and talked about it--and then the girl got her courage up and
blurted out the invitation. And mamma--" Here Mary was once more
a victim to incorrigible merriment. "Mamma tried to say yes, and
COULDN'T! She swallowed and squealed--I mean you coughed, dear! And
then, papa, she said that you and she had promised to go to a lecture
at the Emerson Club to-night, but that her daughter would be delighted
to come to the Big Show! So there I am, and there's Mr. Jim Sheridan
--and there's the clock. Dinner's at seven-thirty!"
And she ran out of the room, scooping up her fallen furs with a
gesture of flying grace as she sped.
When she came down, at twenty munutes after seven, her father stood in
the hall, at the foot of the stairs, waiting to be her escort through
the dark. He looked up and watched her as she descended, and his gaze
was fond and proud--and profoundly disturbed. But she smiled and
nodded gaily, and, when she reached the floor, put a hand on his
shoulder.
"At least no one could suspect me to-night," she said. "I LOOK rich,
don't I, papa?"
She did. She had a look that worshipful girl friends bravely called
"regal." A head taller than her father, she was as straight and
jauntily poised as a boy athlete; and her brown hair and her brown
eyes were like her mother's, but for the rest she went back to some
stronger and livelier ancestor than either of her parents.
"Don't I look too rich to be suspected?" she insisted.
"You look everything beautiful, Mary," he said, huskily.
"And my dress?" She threw open her dark velvet cloak, showing a
splendor of white and silver. "Anything better at Nice next winter,
do you think?" She laughed, shrouding her glittering figure in the
cloak again. "Two years old, and no one would dream it! I did it
over."
"You can do anything, Mary."
There was a curious humility in his tone, and something more--a
significance not veiled and yet abysmally apologetic. It was as if
he suggested something to her and begged her forgiveness in the same
breath.
And upon that, for the moment, she became as serious as he. She
lifted her hand from his shoulder and then set it back more firmly,
so that he should feel the reassurance of its pressure.
"Don't worry," she said, in a low voice and gravely. "I know exactly
what you want me to do."
It was a brave and lustrous banquet; and a noisy one, too, because
there was an orchestra among some plants at one end of the long
dining-room, and after a preliminary stiffness the guests were
impelled to converse--necessarily at the tops of their voices. The
whole company of fifty sat at a great oblong table, improvised for the
occasion by carpenters; but, not betraying itself as an improvisation,
it seemed a permanent continent of damask and lace, with shores of
crystal and silver running up to spreading groves of orchids and
lilies and white roses--an inhabited continent, evidently, for there
were three marvelous, gleaming buildings: one in the center and one
at each end, white miracles wrought by some inspired craftsman in
sculptural icing. They were models in miniature, and they represented
the Sheridan Building, the Sheridan Apartments, and the Pump Works.
Nearly all the guests recognized them without having to be told what
they were, and pronounced the likenesses superb.
The arrangement of the table was visably baronial. At the head sat
the great Thane, with the flower of his family and of the guests about
him; then on each side came the neighbors of the "old" house, grading
down to vassals and retainers--superintendents, cashiers, heads of
departments, and the like--at the foot, where the Thane's lady took
her place as a consolation for the less important. Here, too, among
the thralls and bondmen, sat Bibbs Sheridan, a meek Banquo, wondering
how anybody could look at him and eat.
Nevertheless, there was a vast, continuous eating, for these were
wholesome folk who understood that dinner meant something intended
for introduction into the system by means of an aperture in the face,
devised by nature for that express purpose. And besides, nobody
looked at Bibbs.
He was better content to be left to himself; his voice was not strong
enough to make itself heard over the hubbub without an exhausting
effort, and the talk that went on about him was too fast and too
fragmentary for his drawl to keep pace with it. So he felt relieved
when each of his neighbors in turn, after a polite inquiry about his
health, turned to seek livelier reponses in other directions. For the
talk went on with the eating, incessantly. It rose over the throbbing
of the orchestra and the clatter and clinking of silver and china and
glass, and there was a mighty babble.
"Yes, sir! Started without a dollar." ... "Yellow flounces on the
overskirt--" ... "I says, 'Wilkie, your department's got to go bigger
this year,' I says." ... "Fifteen per cent. turnover in thirty-one
weeks." ... "One of the bigest men in the biggest--" ... "The wife
says she'll have to let out my pants if my appetite--" ... "Say, did
you see that statue of a Turk in the hall? One of the finest things
I ever--" ... "Not a dollar, not a nickel, not one red cent do you
get out o' me,' I says, and so he ups and--" ... "Yes, the baby makes
four, they've lost now." ... "Well, they got their raise, and they
went in big." ... "Yes, sir! Not a dollar to his name, and look at
what--" ... "You wait! The population of this town's goin' to hit the
million mark before she stops." ... "Well, if you can show me a bigger
deal than--"
And through the interstices of this clamoring Bibbs could hear the
continual booming of his father's heavy voice, and once he caught the
sentence, "Yes, young lady, that's just what did it for me, and that's
just what'll do it for my boys--they got to make two blades o' grass
grow where one grew before!" It was his familiar flourish, an old
story to Bibbs, and now jovially declaimed for the edification of Mary
Vertrees.
It was a great night for Sheridan--the very crest of his wave. He
sat there knowing himself Thane and master by his own endeavor; and
his big, smooth, red face grew more and more radiant with good will
and with the simplest, happiest, most boy-like vanity. He was the
picture of health, of good cheer, and of power on a holiday. He had
thirty teeth, none bought, and showed most of them when he laughed;
his grizzled hair was thick, and as unruly as a farm laborer's; his
chest was deep and big beneath its vast facade of starched white
linen, where little diamonds twinkled, circling three large pearls;
his hands were stubby and strong, and he used them freely in gestures
of marked picturesqueness; and, though he had grown fat at chin and
waist and wrist, he had not lost the look of readiness and activity.
He dominated the table, shouting jocular questions and railleries
at every one. His idea was that when people were having a good time
they were noisy; and his own additions to the hubbub increased his
pleasure, and, of course, met the warmest encouragement from his
guests. Edith had discovered that he had very foggy notions of the
difference between a band and an orchestra, and when it was made clear
to him he had held out for a band until Edith threatened tears; but
the size of the orchestra they hired consoled him, and he had now no
regrets in the matter.
He kept time to the music continually--with his feet, or pounding on
the table with his fist, and sometimes with spoon or knife upon his
plate or a glass, without permitting these side-products to interfere
with the real business of eating and shouting.
"Tell 'em to play 'Nancy Lee'!" he would bellow down the length of
the table to his wife, while the musicians were in the midst of the
"Toreador" song, perhaps. "Ask that fellow if they don't know 'Nancy
Lee'!" And when the leader would shake his head apologetically in
answer to an obedient shriek from Mrs. Sheridan, the "Toreador"
continuing vehemently, Sheridan would roar half-remembered fragments
of "Nancy Lee," naturally mingling some Bizet with the air of that
uxorious tribute.
"Oh, there she stands and waves her hands while I'm away! "A sail-er's
wife a sail-er's star should be! Yo ho, oh, oh! "Oh, Nancy, Nancy,
Nancy Lee! Oh, Na-hancy Lee!"
"HAY, there, old lady!" he would bellow. "Tell 'em to play 'In the
Gloaming.' In the gloaming, oh, my darling, la-la-lum-tee--Well, if
they don't know that, what's the matter with 'Larboard Watch, Ahoy'?
THAT'S good music! That's the kind o' music I like! Come on, now!
Mrs. Callin, get 'em singin' down in your part o' the table. What's
the matter you folks down there, anyway? Larboard watch, ahoy!"
"What joy he feels, as--ta-tum-dum-tee-dee-dum steals. La-a-r-board
watch, ahoy!"
No external bubbling contributed to this effervescence; the Sheridans'
table had never borne wine, and, more because of timidity about it
than conviction, it bore none now; though "mineral waters" were
copiously poured from bottles wrapped, for some reason, in napkins,
and proved wholly satisfactory to almost all of the guests. And
certainly no wine could have inspired more turbulent good spirits in
the host. Not even Bibbs was an alloy in this night's happiness, for,
as Mrs. Sheridan had said, he had "plans for Bibbs"--plans which were
going to straighten out some things that had gone wrong.
So he pounded the table and boomed his echoes of old songs, and then,
forgetting these, would renew his friendly railleries, or perhaps,
turning to Mary Vertrees, who sat near him, round the corner of the
table at his right, he would become autobiographical. Gentlemen
less naive than he had paid her that tribute, for she was a girl who
inspired the autobiographical impulse in every man who met her--it
needed but the sight of her.
The dinner seemed, somehow, to center about Mary Vertrees and the
jocund host as a play centers about its hero and heroine; they were
the rubicund king and the starry princess of this spectacle--they paid
court to each other, and everybody paid court to them. Down near the
sugar Pump Works, where Bibbs sat, there was audible speculation and
admiration. "Wonder who that lady is--makin' such a hit with the old
man." "Must be some heiress." "Heiress? Golly, I guess I could
stand it to marry rich, then!"
Edith and Sibyl were radiant: at first they had watched Miss Vertrees
with an almost haggard anxiety, wondering what disasterous effect
Sheridan's pastoral gaieties--and other things--would have upon her,
but she seemed delighted with everything, and with him most of all.
She treated him as if he were some delicious, foolish old joke that
she understood perfectly, laughing at him almost violently when he
bragged--probably his first experience of that kind in his life. It
enchanted him.
As he proclaimed to the table, she had "a way with her." She had,
indeed, as Roscoe Sheridan, upon her right, discovered just after
the feast began. Since his marriage three years before, no lady had
bestowed upon him so protracted a full view of brilliant eyes; and,
with the look, his lovely neighbor said--and it was her first speech
to him--
"I hope you're very susceptible, Mr. Sheridan!"
Honest Roscoe was taken aback, and "Why?" was all he managed to say.
She repeated the look deliberately, which was noted, with a
mystification equal to his own, by his sister across the table.
No one, reflected Edith, could image Mary Vertrees the sort of girl
who would "really flirt" with married men--she was obviously the
"opposite of all that." Edith defined her as a "thoroughbred,"
a "nice girl"; and the look given to Roscoe was astounding. Roscoe's
wife saw it, too, and she was another whom it puzzled--though not
because its recipient was married.
"Because!" said Mary Vertrees, replying to Roscoe's monosyllable.
"And also because we're next-door neighbors at table, and it's dull
times ahead for both of us if we don't get along."
Roscoe was a literal young man, all stocks and bonds, and he had been
brought up to believe that when a man married he "married and settled
down." It was "all right," he felt, for a man as old as his father to
pay florid compliments to as pretty a girl as this Miss Vertrees, but
for himself--"a young married man"--it wouldn't do; and it wouldn't
even be quite moral. He knew that young married people might have
friendships, like his wife's for Lamhorn; but Sibyl and Lamhorn never
"flirted"--they were always very matter-of-fact with each other.
Roscoe would have been troubled if Sibyl had ever told Lamhorn she
hoped he was susceptible.
"Yes--we're neighbors," he said, awkwardly.
"Next-door neighbors in houses, too," she added.
"No, not exactly. I live across the street."
"Why, no!" she exclaimed, and seemed startled. "Your mother told me
this afternoon that you lived at home."
"Yes, of course I live at home. I built that new house across the
street."
"But you--" she paused, confused, and then slowly a deep color came
into her cheek. "But I understood--"
"No," he said; "my wife and I lived with the old folks the first year,
but that's all. Edith and Jim live with them, of course."
"I--I see," she said, the deep color still deepening as she turned
from him and saw, written upon a card before the gentleman at her
left the name, "Mr. James Sheridan, Jr." And from that moment Roscoe
had little enough cause for wondering what he ought to reply to her
disturbing coquetries.
Mr. James Sheridan had been anxiously waiting for the dazzling visitor
to "get through with old Roscoe," as he thought of it, and give a
bachelor a chance. "Old Roscoe" was the younger, but he had always
been the steady wheel-horse of the family. Jim was "steady" enough,
but was considered livelier than Roscoe, which in truth is not saying
much for Jim's liveliness. As their father habitually boasted, both
brothers were "capable, hard-working young business men," and the
principal difference between them was merely that which resulted from
Jim's being still a bachelor. Physically they were of the same type:
dark of eyes and of hair, fresh-colored and thick-set, and though
Roscoe was several inches taller than Jim, neither was of the height,
breadth, or depth of the father. Both wore young business men's
mustaches, and either could have sat for the tailor-shop lithographs
of young business men wearing "rich suitings in dark mixtures."
Jim, approving warmly of his neighbor's profile, perceived her access
of color, which increased his approbation. "What's that old Roscoe
saying to you, Miss Vertrees?" he asked. "These young married men are
mighty forward nowadays, but you mustn't let 'em make you blush."
"Am I blushing?" she said. "Are you sure?" And with that she gave
him ample opportunity to make sure, repeating with interest the look
wasted upon Roscoe. "I think you must be mistaken," she continued.
"I think it's your brother who is blushing. I've thrown him into
confusion."
"How?"
She laughed, and then, leaning to him a little, said in a tone
as confidential as she could make it, under cover of the uproar.
"By trying to begin with him a courtship I meant for YOU!"
This might well be a style new to Jim; and it was. He supposed it
a nonsensical form of badinage, and yet it took his breath. He
realized that he wished what she said to be the literal truth, and
he was instantly snared by that realization.
"By George!" he said. "I guess you're the kind of girl that can say
anything--yes, and get away with it, too!"
She laughed again--in her way, so that he could not tell whether she
was laughing at him or at herself or at the nonsense she was talking;
and she said: "But you see I don't care whether I get away with it
or not. I wish you'd tell me frankly if you think I've got a change
to get away with YOU?"
"More like if you've got a chance to get away FROM me!" Jim was
inspired to reply. "Not one in the world, especially after beginning
by making fun of me like that."
"I mightn't be so much in fun as you think," she said, regarding him
with sudden gravity.
"Well," said Jim, in simple honesty, "you're a funny girl!"
Her gravity continued an instant longer. "I may not turn out to be
funny for YOU."
"So long as you turn out to be anything at all for me, I expect I can
manage to be satisfied." And with that, to his own surprise, it was
his turn to blush, whereupon she laughed again.
"Yes," he said, plaintively, not wholly lacking intuition, "I can see
you're the sort of girl that would laugh the minute you see a man
really means anything!"
"'Laugh'!" she cried, gaily. "Why, it might be a matter of life and
death! But if you want tragedy, I'd better put the question at once,
considering the mistake I made with your brother."
Jim was dazed. She seemed to be playing a little game of mockery
and nonsense with him, but he had glimpses of a flashing danger in
it; he was but too sensible of being outclassed, and had somewhere a
consciousness that he could never quite know this giddy and alluring
lady, no matter how long it pleased her to play with him. But he
mightily wanted her to keep on playing with him.
"Put what question?" he said, breathlessly.
"As you are a new neighbor of mine and of my family," she returned,
speaking slowly and with a cross-examiner's severity, "I think it
would be well for me to know at once whether you are already walking
out with any young lady or not. Mr. Sheridan, think well! Are you
spoken for?"
"Not yet," he gasped. "Are you?"
"NO!" she cried, and with that they both laughed again; and the
pastime proceeded, increasing both in its gaiety and in its gravity.
Observing its continuance, Mr. Robert Lamhorn, opposite, turned from
a lively conversation with Edith and remarked covertly to Sibyl that
Miss Vertrees was "starting rather picturesquely with Jim." And he
added, languidly, "Do you suppose she WOULD?"
For the moment Sibyl gave no sign of having heard him, but seemed
interested in the clasp of a long "rope" of pearls, a loop of which
she was allowing to swing from her fingers, resting her elbow upon the
table and following with her eyes the twinkle of diamonds and platinum
in the clasp at the end of the loop. She wore many jewels. She was
pretty, but hers was not the kind of prettiness to be loaded with too
sumptuous accessories, and jeweled head-dresses are dangerous--they
may emphasize the wrongness of the wearer.
"I said Miss Vertrees seems to be starting pretty strong with Jim,"
repeated Mr. Lamhorn.
"I heard you." There was a latent discontent always somewhere in her
eyes, no matter what she threw upon the surface of cover it, and just
now she did not care to cover it; she looked sullen. "Starting any
stronger than you did with Edith?" she inquired.
"Oh, keep the peace!" he said, crossly. "That's off, of course."
"You haven't been making her see it this evening--precisely," said
Sibyl, looking at him steadily. "You've talked to her for--"
"For Heaven's sake," he begged, "keep the peace!"
"Well, what have you just been doing?"
"SH!" he said. "Listen to your father-in-law."
Sheridan was booming and braying louder than ever, the orchestra
having begun to play "The Rosary," to his vast content.
"I COUNT THEM OVER, LA-LA-TUM-TEE-DUM," he roared, beating the
measures with his fork. "EACH HOUR A PEARL, EACH PEARL TEE-DUM-
TUM-DUM--What's the matter with all you folks? Why'n't you SING?
Miss Vertrees, I bet a thousand dollars YOU sing! Why'n't--"
"Mr. Sheridan," she said, turning cheerfully from the ardent Jim,
"you don't know what you interrupted! Your son isn't used to my
rough ways, and my soldier's wooing frightens him, but I think he
was about to say something important."
"I'll say something important to him if he doesn't!" the father
threatened, more delighted with her than ever. "By gosh! if I was
his age--or a widower right NOW--"
"Oh, wait!" cried Mary. "If they'd only make less noice! I want
Mrs. Sheridan to hear."
"She'd say the same," he shouted. "She'd tell me I was mighty slow
if I couldn't get ahead o' Jim. Why, when I was his age--"
"You must listen to your father," Mary interrupted, turning to Jim,
who had grown read again. "He's going to tell us how, when he was
your age, he made those two blades of grass grow out of a teacup--and
you could see for yourself he didn't get them out of his sleeve!"
At that Sheridan pounded the table till it jumped. "Look here, young
lady!" he roared. "Some o' these days I'm either goin' to slap you--
or I'm goin' to kiss you!"
Edith looked aghast; she was afraid this was indeed "too awful," but
Mary Vertrees burst into ringing laughter.
"Both!" she cried. "Both! The one to make me forget the other!"
"But which--" he began, and then suddenly gave forth such stentorian
trumpetings of mirth that for once the whole table stopped to listen.
"Jim," he roared, "if you don't propose to that girl to-night I'll
send you back to the machine-shop with Bibbs!"
And Bibbs--down among the retainers by the sugar Pump Works, and
watching Mary Vertrees as a ragged boy in the street might watch a
rich little girl in a garden--Bibbs heard. He heard--and he knew
what his father's plans were now.
Mrs. Vertrees "sat up" for her daughter, Mr. Vertrees having retired
after a restless evening, not much soothed by the society of his
Landseers. Mary had taken a key, insisting that he should not come
for her and seeming confident that she would not lack for escort; nor
did the sequel prove her confidence unwarranted. But Mrs. Vertrees
had a long vigil of it.
She was not the woman to make herself easy--no servant had ever seen
her in a wrapper--and with her hair and dress and her shoes just what
they had been when she returned from the afternoon's call, she sat
through the slow night hours in a stiff little chair under the
gaslight in her own room, which was directly over the "front hall."
There, book in hand, she employed the time in her own reminiscences,
though it was her belief that she was reading Madame de Remusat's.
Her thoughts went backward into her life and into her husband's; and
the deeper into the past they went, the brighter the pictures they
brought her--and there is tragedy. Like her husband, she thought
backward because she did not dare think forward definitely. What
thinking forward this troubled couple ventured took the form of a
slender hope which neither of them could have borne to hear put in
words, and yet they had talked it over, day after day, from the very
hour when they heard Sheridan was to build his New House next door.
For--so quickly does any ideal of human behavior become an antique
--their youth was of the innocent old days, so dead! of "breeding"
and "gentility," and no craft had been more straitly trained upon
them than that of talking about things without mentioning them.
Herein was marked the most vital difference between Mr. and Mrs.
Vertrees and their big new neighbor. Sheridan, though his youth
was of the same epoch, knew nothing of such matters. He had been
chopping wood for the morning fire in the country grocery while they
were still dancing.
It was after one o'clock when Mrs. Vertrees heard steps and the
delicate clinking of the key in the lock, and then, with the opening
of the door, Mary's laugh, and "Yes--if you aren't afraid--to-morrow!"
The door closed, and she rushed up-stairs, bringing with her a breath
of cold and bracing air into her mother's room. "Yes," she said,
before Mrs. Vertrees could speak, "he brought me home!"
She let her cloak fall upon the bed, and, drawing an old red-velvet
rocking-chair forward, sat beside her mother after giving her a light
pat upon the shoulder and a hearty kiss upon the cheek.
"Mamma!" Mary exclaimed, when Mrs. Vertrees had expressed a hope that
she had enjoyed the evening and had not caught cold. "Why don't you
ask me?"
This inquiry obviously made her mother uncomfortable. "I don't--"
she faltered. "Ask you what, Mary?"
"How I got along and what he's like."
"Mary!"
"Oh, it isn't distressing!" said Mary. "And I got along so fast--"
She broke off to laugh; continuing then, "But that's the way I went
at it, of course. We ARE in a hurry, aren't we?"
"I don't know what you mean," Mrs. Vertrees insisted, shaking her
head plaintively.
"Yes," said Mary, "I'm going out in his car with him to-morrow
afternoon, and to the theater the next night--but I stopped it there.
You see, after you give the first push, you must leave it to them
while YOU pretend to run away!"
"My dear, I don't know what to--"
"What to make of anything!" Mary finished for her. "So that's all
right! Now I'll tell you all about it. It was gorgeous and deafening
and tee-total. We could have lived a year on it. I'm not good at
figures, but I calculated that if we lived six months on poor old
Charlie and Ned and the station-wagon and the Victoria, we could
manage at least twice as long on the cost of the 'house-warming.'
I think the orchids alone would have lasted us a couple of months.
There they were, before me, but I couldn't steal 'em and sell 'em,
and so--well, so I did what I could!"
She leaned back and laughed reassuringly to her troubled mother.
"It seemed to be a success--what I could," she said, clasping her
hands behind her neck and stirring the rocker to motion as a rhythmic
accompaniment to her narrative. "The girl Edith and her sister-in-
law, Mrs. Roscoe Sheridan, were too anxious about the effect of things
on me. The father's worth a bushel of both of them, if they knew it.
He's what he is. I like him." She paused reflectively, continuing,
"Edith's 'interested' in that Lamhorn boy; he's good-looking and not
stupid, but I think he's--" She interrupted herself with a cheery
outcry: "Oh! I mustn't be calling him names! If he's trying to make
Edith like him, I ought to respect him as a colleague."
"I don't understand a thing you're talking about," Mrs. Vertrees
complained.
"All the better! Well, he's a bad lot, that Lamhorn boy; everybody's
always known that, but the Sheridans don't know the everybodies that
know. He sat between Edith and Mrs. Roscoe Sheridan. SHE'S like
those people you wondered about at the theater, the last time we
went --dressed in ball-gowns; bound to show their clothes and jewels
SOMEwhere! She flatters the father, and so did I, for that matter--
but not that way. I treated him outrageously!"
"Mary!"
"That's what flattered him. After dinner he made the whole regiment
of us follow him all over the house, while he lectured like a guide
on the Palatine. He gave dimensions and costs, and the whole b'ilin'
of 'em listened as if they thought he intended to make them a present
of the house. What he was proudest of was the plumbing and that Bay
of Naples panorama in the hall. He made us look at all the plumbing
--bath-rooms and everywhere else--and then he made us look at the Bay
of Naples. He said it was a hundred and eleven feet long, but I think
it's more. And he led us all into the ready-made library to see a
poem Edith had taken a prize with at school. They'd had it printed
in gold letters and framed in mother-of-pearl. But the poem itself
was rather simple and wistful and nice--he read it to us, though Edith
tried to stop him. She was modest about it, and said she'd never
written anything else. And then, after a while, Mrs. Roscoe Sheridan
asked me to come across the street to her house with them--her husband
and Edith and Mr. Lamhorn and Jim Sheridan--"
Mrs. Vertrees was shocked. "'Jim'!" she exclaimed. "Mary, PLEASE--"
"Of course," said Mary. "I'll make it as easy for you as I can,
mamma. Mr. James Sheridan, Junior. We went over there, and Mrs.
Roscoe explained that 'the men were all dying for a drink,' though
I noticed that Mr. Lamhorn was the only one near death's door on that
account. Edith and Mrs. Roscoe said they knew I'd been bored at the
dinner. They were objectionably apologetic about it, and they seemed
to think NOW we were going to have a 'good time' to make up for it.
But I hadn't been bored at the dinner, I'd been amused; and the 'good
time' at Mrs. Roscoe's was horribly, horribly stupid."
"But, Mary," her mother began, "is--is--" And she seemed unable to
complete the question.
"Never mind, mamma. I'll say it. Is Mr. James Sheridan, Junior,
stupid? I'm sure he's not at all stupid about business. Otherwise
--Oh, what right have I to be calling people 'stupid' because they're
not exactly my kind? On the big dinner-table they had enormous icing
models of the Sheridan Building--"
"Oh, no!" Mrs. Vertrees cried. "Surely not!"
"Yes, and two other things of that kind--I don't know what. But,
after all, I wondered if they were so bad. If I'd been at a dinner
at a palace in Italy, and a relief or inscription on one of the old
silver pieces had referred to some great deed or achievement of the
family, I shouldn't have felt superior; I'd have thought it
picturesque and stately--I'd have been impressed. And what's the
real difference? The icing is temporary, and that's much more modest,
isn't it? And why is it vulgar to feel important more on account of
something you've done yourself than because of something one of your
ancestors did? Besides, if we go back a few generations, we've all
got such hundreds of ancestors it seems idiotic to go picking out one
or two to be proud of ourselves about. Well, then, mamma, I managed
not to feel superior to Mr. James Sheridan, Junior, because he didn't
see anything out of place in the Sheridan Building in sugar."
Mrs. Vertrees's expression had lost none of its anxiety pending the
conclusion of this lively bit of analysis, and she shook her head
gravely. "My dear, dear child," she said, "it seems to me--It looks
--I'm afraid--"
"Say as much of it as you can, mamma," said Mary, encouragingly.
"I can get it, if you'll just give me one key-word."
"Everything you say," Mrs. Vertrees began, timidly, "seems to have
the air of--it is as if you were seeking to--to make yourself--"
"Oh, I see! You mean I sound as if I were trying to force myself
to like him."
"Not exactly, Mary. That wasn't quite what I meant," said Mrs.
Vertrees, speaking direct untruth with perfect unconsciousness.
"But you said that--that you found the latter part of the evening
at young Mrs. Sheridan's unentertaining--"
"And as Mr. James Sheridan was there, and I saw more of him than
at dinner, and had a horribly stupid time in spite of that, you
think I--" And then it was Mary who left the deduction unfinished.
Mrs. Vertrees nodded; and though both the mother and the daughter
understood, Mary felt it better to make the understanding definite.
"Well," she asked, gravely, "is there anything else I can do? You
and papa don't want me to do anything that distresses me, and so,
as this is the only thing to be done, it seems it's up to me not to
let it distress me. That's all there is about it, isn't it?"
"But nothing MUST distress you!" the mother cried.
"That's what I say!" said Mary, cheerfully. "And so it doesn't.
It's all right." She rose and took her cloak over her arm, as if to
go to her own room. But on the way to the door she stopped, and stood
leaning against the foot of the bed, contemplating a threadbare rug at
her feet. "Mother, you've told me a thousand times that it doesn't
really matter whom a girl marries."
"No, no!" Mrs. Vertrees protested. "I never said such a--"
"No, not in words; I mean what you MEANT. It's true, isn't it, that
marriage really is 'not a bed of roses, but a field of battle'? To
get right down to it, a girl could fight it out with anybody, couldn't
she? One man as well as another?"
"Oh, my dear! I'm sure your father and I--"
"Yes, yes," said Mary, indulgently. "I don't mean you and papa.
But isn't it propinquity that makes marriages? So many people
say so, there must be something in it."
"Mary, I can't bear for you to talk like that." And Mrs. Vertrees
lifted pleading eyes to her daughter--eyes that begged to be spared.
"It sound--almost reckless!"
Mary caught the appeal, came to her, and kissed her gaily. "Never
fret, dear! I'm not likely to do anything I don't want to do--I've
always been too thorough-going a little pig! And if it IS propinquity
that does our choosing for us, well, at least no girl in the world
could ask for more than THAT! How could there be any more propinquity
than the very house next door?"
She gave her mother a final kiss and went gaily all the way to the
door this time, pausing for her postscript with her hand on the knob.
"Oh, the one that caught me looking in the window, mamma, the youngest
one--"
"Did he speak of it?" Mrs. Vertrees asked, apprehensively.
"No. He didn't speak at all, that I saw, to any one. I didn't
meet him. But he isn't insane, I'm sure; or if he is, he has long
intervals when he's not. Mr. James Sheridan mentioned that he lived
at home when he was 'well enough'; and it may be he's only an invalid.
He looks dreadfully ill, but he has pleasant eyes, and it struck me
that if--if one were in the Sheridan family"--she laughed a little
ruefully--"he might be interesting to talk to sometimes, when there
was too much stocks and bonds. I didn't see him after dinner."
"There must be something wrong with him," said Mrs. Vertrees.
"They'd have introduced him if there wasn't."
"I don't know. He's been ill so much and away so much--sometimes
people like that just don't seem to 'count' in a family. His father
spoke of sending him back to a machine-shop or some sort; I suppose
he meant when the poor thing gets better. I glanced at him just
then, when Mr. Sheridan mentioned him, and he happened to be looking
straight at me; and he was pathetic-looking enough before that, but
the most tragic change came over him. He seemed just to die, right
there at the table!"
"You mean when his father spoke of sending him to the shop place?"
"Yes."
"Mr. Sheridan must be very unfeeling."
"No," said Mary, thoughtfully, "I don't think he is; but he might be
uncomprehending, and certainly he's the kind of man to do anything he
once sets out to do. But I wish I hadn't been looking at that poor
boy just then! I'm afraid I'll keep remembering--"
"I wouldn't." Mrs. Vertrees smiled faintly, and in her smile there
was the remotest ghost of a genteel roguishness. "I'd keep my mind
on pleasanter things, Mary."
Mary laughed and nodded. "Yes, indeed! Plenty pleasant enough,
and probably, if all were known, too good--even for me!"
And when she had gone Mrs. Vertrees drew a long breath, as if a burden
were off her mind, and, smiling, began to undress in a gentle reverie.
Edith, glancing casually into the "ready-made" library, stopped
abruptly, seeing Bibbs there alone. He was standing before the
pearl-framed and golden-lettered poem, musingly inspecting it.
He read it:
Fugitive
I will forget the things that sting:
The lashing look, the barbed word.
I know the very hands that fling
The stones at me had never stirred
To anger but for their own scars.
They've suffered so, that's why they strike.
I'll keep my heart among the stars
Where none shall hunt it out. Oh, like
These wounded ones I must not be,
For, wounded, I might strike in turn!
So, none shall hurt me. Far and free
Where my heart flies no one shall learn.
"Bibbs!" Edith's voice was angry, and her color deepened suddenly
as she came into the room, preceded by a scent of violets much more
powerful than that warranted by the actual bunch of them upon the
lapel of her coat.
Bibbs did not turn his head, but wagged it solemnly, seeming depressed
by the poem. "Pretty young, isn't it?" he said. "There must have
been something about your looks that got the prize, Edith; I can't
believe the poem did it."
She glanced hurriedly over her shoulder and spoke sharply, but in a
low voice: "I don't think it's very nice of you to bring it up at
all, Bibbs. I'd like a chance to forget the whole silly business.
I didn't want them to frame it, and I wish to goodness papa'd quit
talking about it; but here, that night, after the dinner, didn't he go
and read it aloud to the whole crowd of 'em! And then they all wanted
to know what other poems I'd written and why I didn't keep it up and
write some more, and if I didn't, why didn't I, and why this and why
that, till I thought I'd die of shame!"
"You could tell 'em you had writer's cramp," Bibbs suggested.
"I couldn't tell 'em anything! I just choke with mortification every
time anybody speaks of the thing."
Bibbs looked grieved. "The poem isn't THAT bad, Edith. You see, you
were only seventeen when you wrote it."
"Oh, hush up!" she snapped. "I wish it had burnt my fingers the first
time I touched it. Then I might have had sense enough to leave it
where it was. I had no business to take it, and I've been ashamed--"
"No, no," he said, comfortingly. "It was the very most flattering
thing ever happen to me. It was almost my last flight before I went
to the machine-shop, and it's pleasant to think somebody liked it
enough to--"
"But I DON'T like it!" she exclaimed. "I don't even understand it
--and papa made so much fuss over its getting the prize, I just hate
it! The truth is I never dreamed it'd get the prize."
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