The Turmoil (10 page)

“Look out there!” he bade his son. “Look out o’ that window! Look at the life and evergy down there! I should think ANY young man’s blood would tingle to get into it and be part of it. Look at the big things young men are doin’ in this town!” He swung about, coming to the mahogany desk in the middle of the room. “Look at what I was doin’ at your age! Look at what your own brothers are doin’! Look at Roscoe! Yes, and look at Jim! I made Jim president o’ the Sheridan Realty Company last New-Year’s, with charge of every inch o’ ground and every brick and every shingle and stick o’ wood we own; and it’s an example to any young man—or ole man, either—the way he took ahold of it. Last July we found out we wanted two more big warehouses at the Pump Works—wanted ‘em quick. Contractors said it couldn’t be done; said nine or ten months at the soonest; couldn’t see it any other way. What’d Jim do? Took the contract himself; found a fellow with a new cement and concrete process; kept men on the job night and day, and stayed on it night and day himself—and, by George! we begin to USE them warehouses next week! Four months and a half, and every inch fireproof! I tell you Jim’s one o’ these fellers that make miracles happen! Now, I don’t say every young man can be like Jim, because there’s mighty few got his ability, but every young man can go in and do his share. This town is God’s own country, and there’s opportunity for anybody with a pound of energy and an ounce o’ gumption. I tell you these young business men I watch just do my heart good! THEY don’t set around on the back fence—no, sir! They take enough exercise to keep their health; and they go to a baseball game once or twice a week in summer, maybe, and they’re raisin’ nice families, with sons to take their places sometime and carry on the work—because the work’s got to go ON! They’re puttin’ their life-blood into it, I tell you, and that’s why we’re gettin’ bigger every minute, and why THEY’RE gettin’ bigger, and why it’s all goin’ to keep ON gettin’ bigger!”

He slapped the desk resoundingly with his open palm, and then, observing that Bibbs remained in the same impassive attitude, with his eyes still fixed upon the ceiling in a contemplation somewhat plaintive, Sheridan was impelled to groan. “Oh, Lord!” he said. “This is the way you always were. I don’t believe you understood a darn word I been sayin’! You don’t LOOK as if you did. By George! it’s discouraging!”

“I don’t understand about getting—about getting bigger,” said Bibbs, bringing his gaze down to look at his father placatively. “I don’t see just why—”

“WHAT?” Sheridan leaned forward, resting his hands upon the desk and staring across it incredulously at his son.

“I don’t understand—exactly—what you want it all bigger for?”

“Great God!” shouted Sheridan, and struck the desk a blow with his clenched fist. “A son of mine asks me that! You go out and ask the poorest day-laborer you can find! Ask him that question—”

“I did once,” Bibbs interrupted; “when I was in the machine-shop. I—”

“Wha’d he say?”

“He said, ‘Oh, hell!’” answered Bibbs, mildly.

“Yes, I reckon he would!” Sheridan swung away from the desk. “I reckon he certainly would! And I got plenty sympathy with him right now, myself!”

“It’s the same answer, then?” Bibbs’s voice was serious, almost tremulous.

“Damnation!” Sheridan roared. “Did you ever hear the word Prosperity, you ninny? Did you ever hear the word Ambition? Did you ever hear the word PROGRESS?”

He flung himself into a chair after the outburst, his big chest surging, his throat tumultuous with gutteral incoherences. “Now then,” he said, huskily, when the anguish had somewhat abated, “what do you want to do?”

“Sir?”

“What do you WANT to do, I said.”

Taken by surprise, Bibbs stammered. “What—what do—I—what—”

“If I’d let you do exactly what you had the whim for, what would you do?”

Bibbs looked startled; then timidity overwhelmed him—a profound shyness. He bent his head and fixed his lowered eyes upon the toe of his shoe, which he moved to and fro upon the rug, like a culprit called to the desk in school.

“What would you do? Loaf?”

“No, sir.” Bibbs’s voice was almost inaudible, and what little sound it made was unquestionably a guilty sound. “I suppose I’d—I’d—”

“Well?”

“I suppose I’d try to—to write.”

“Write what?”

“Nothing important—just poems and essays, perhaps.”

“That all?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I see,” said his father, breathing quickly with the restraint he was putting upon himself. “That is, you want to write, but you don’t want to write anything of any account.”

“You think—”

Sheridan got up again. “I take my hat off to the man that can write a good ad,” he said, emphatically. “The best writin’ talent in this country is right spang in the ad business to-day. You buy a magazine for good writin’—look on the back of it! Let me tell you I pay money for that kind o’ writin’. Maybe you think it’s easy. Just try it! I’ve tried it, and I can’t do it. I tell you an ad’s got to be written so it makes people do the hardest thing in this world to GET ‘em to do: it’s got to make ‘em give up their MONEY! You talk about ‘poems and essays.’ I tell you when it comes to the actual skill o’ puttin’ words together so as to make things HAPPEN, R. T. Bloss, right here in this city, knows more in a minute than George Waldo Emerson ever knew in his whole life!”

“You—you may be—” Bibbs said, indistinctly, the last word smothered in a cough.

“Of COURSE I’m right! And if it ain’t just like you to want to take up with the most out-o’-date kind o’ writin’ there is! ‘Poems and essays’! My Lord, Bibbs, that’s WOMEN’S work! You can’t pick up a newspaper without havin’ to see where Mrs. Rumskididle read a paper on ‘Jane Eyre,’ or ‘East Lynne,’ at the God-Knows-What Club. And ‘poetry’! Why, look at Edith! I expect that poem o’ hers would set a pretty high-water mark for you, young man, and it’s the only one she’s ever managed to write in her whole LIFE! When I wanted her to go on and write some more she said it took too much time. Said it took months and months. And Edith’s a smart girl; she’s got more energy in her little finger than you ever give me a chance to see in your whole body, Bibbs. Now look at the facts: say she could turn out four or five poems a year and you could turn out maybe two. That medal she got was worth about fifteen dollars, so there’s your income —thirty dollars a year! That’s a fine success to make of your life! I’m not sayin’ a word against poetry. I wouldn’t take ten thousand dollars right now for that poem of Edith’s; and poetry’s all right enough in its place—but you leave it to the girls. A man’s got to do a man’s work in this world!”

He seated himself in a chair at his son’s side and, leaning over, tapped Bibbs confidentially on the knee. “This city’s got the greatest future in America, and if my sons behave right by me and by themselves they’re goin’ to have a mighty fair share of it—a mighty fair share. I love this town. It’s God’s own footstool, and it’s made money for me every day right along, I don’t know how many years. I love it like I do my own business, and I’d fight for it as quick as I’d fight for my own family. It’s a beautiful town. Look at our wholesale district; look at any district you want to; look at the park system we’re puttin’ through, and the boulevards and the public statuary. And she grows. God! how she grows!” He had become intensely grave; he spoke with solemnity. “Now, Bibbs, I can’t take any of it—nor any gold or silver nor buildings nor bonds—away with me in my shroud when I have to go. But I want to leave my share in it to my boys. I’ve worked for it; I’ve been a builder and a maker; and two blades of grass have grown where one grew before, whenever I laid my hand on the ground and willed ‘em to grow. I’ve built big, and I want the buildin’ to go on. And when my last hour comes I want to know that my boys are ready to take charge; that they’re fit to take charge and go ON with it. Bibbs, when that hour comes I want to know that my boys are big men, ready and fit to hold of big things. Bibbs, when I’m up above I want to know that the big share I’ve made mine, here below, is growin’ bigger and bigger in the charge of my boys.”

He leaned back, deeply moved. “There!” he said, huskily. “I’ve never spoken more what was in my heart in my life. I do it because I want you to understand—and not think me a mean father. I never had to talk that way to Jim and Roscoe. They understood without any talk, Bibbs.”

“I see,” said Bibbs. “At least I think I do. But—”

“Wait a minute!” Sheridan raised his hand. “If you see the least bit in the world, then you understand how it feels to me to have my son set here and talk about ‘poems and essays’ and such-like fooleries. And you must understand, too, what it meant to start one o’ my boys and have him come back on me the way you did, and have to be sent to a sanitarium because he couldn’t stand work. Now, let’s get right down to it, Bibbs. I’ve had a whole lot o’ talk with ole Doc Gurney about you, one time another, and I reckon I understand your case just about as well as he does, anyway! Now here, I’ll be frank with you. I started you in harder than what I did the other boys, and that was for your own good, because I saw you needed to be shook up more’n they did. You were always kind of moody and mopish—and you needed work that’d keep you on the jump. Now, why did it make you sick instead of brace you up and make a man of you the way it ought of done? I pinned ole Gurney down to it. I says, ‘Look here, ain’t it really because he just plain hated it?’ ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘that’s it. If he’d enjoyed it, it wouldn’t ‘a’ hurt him. He loathes it, and that affects his nervous system. The more he tries it, the more he hates it; and the more he hates it, the more injury it does him.’ That ain’t quite his words, but it’s what he meant. And that’s about the way it is.”

“Yes,” said Bibbs, “that’s about the way it is.”

“Well, then, I reckon it’s up to me not only to make you do it, but to make you like it!”

Bibbs shivered. And he turned upon his father a look that was almost ghostly. “I can’t,” he said, in a low voice. “I can’t.”

“Can’t go back to the shop?”

“No. Can’t like it. I can’t.”

Sheridan jumped up, his patience gone. To his own view, he had reasoned exhaustively, had explained fully and had pleaded more than a father should, only to be met in the end with the unreasoning and mysterious stubbornness which had been Bibbs’s baffling characteristic from childhood. “By George, you will!” he cried. “You’ll go back there and you’ll like it! Gurney says it won’t hurt you if you like it, and he says it’ll kill you if you go back and hate it; so it looks as if it was about up to you not to hate it. Well, Gurney’s a fool! Hatin’ work doesn’t kill anybody; and this isn’t goin’ to kill you, whether you hate it or not. I’ve never made a mistake in a serious matter in my life, and it wasn’t a mistake my sendin’ you there in the first place. And I’m goin’ to prove it—I’m goin’ to send you back there and vindicate my judgment. Gurney says it’s all ‘mental attitude.’ Well, you’re goin’ to learn the right one! He says in a couple more months this fool thing that’s been the matter with you’ll be disappeared completely and you’ll be back in as good or better condition than you were before you ever went into the shop. And right then is when you begin over—right in that same shop! Nobody can call me a hard man or a mean father. I do the best I can for my chuldern, and I take full responsibility for bringin’ my sons up to be men. Now, so far, I’ve failed with you. But I’m not goin’ to keep ON failin’. I never tackled a job YET I didn’t put through, and I’m not goin’ to begin with my own son. I’m goin’ to make a MAN of you. By God! I am!”

Bibbs rose and went slowly to the door, where he turned. “You say you give me a couple of months?” he said.

Sheridan pushed a bell-button on his desk. “Gurney said two months more would put you back where you were. You go home and begin to get yourself in the right ‘mental attitude’ before those two months are up! Good-by!”

“Good-by, sir,” said Bibbs, meekly.

Bibbs’s room, that neat apartment for transients to which the “lamidal” George had shown him upon his return, still bore the appearance of temporary quarters, possibly because Bibbs had no clear conception of himself as a permanent incumbent. However, he had set upon the mantelpiece the two photographs that he owned: one, a “group” twenty years old—his father and mother, with Jim and Roscoe as boys—and the other a “cabinet” of Edith at sixteen. And upon a table were the books he had taken from his trunk: Sartor Resartus, Virginibus Puerisque, Huckleberry Finn, and Afterwhiles. There were some other books in the trunk—a large one, which remained unremoved at the foot of the bed, adding to the general impression of transiency. It contained nearly all the possessions as well as the secret life of Bibbs Sheridan, and Bibbs sat beside it, the day after his interview with his father, raking over a small collection of manuscripts in the top tray. Some of these he glanced through dubiously, finding little comfort in them; but one made him smile. Then he shook his head ruefully indeed, and ruefully began to read it. It was written on paper stamped “Hood Sanitarium,” and bore the title, “Leisure.”

A man may keep a quiet heart at seventy miles an hour, but not if he is running the train. Nor is the habit of contemplation a useful quality in the stoker of a foundry furnace; it will not be found to recommend him to the approbation of his superiors. For a profession adapted solely to the pursuit of happiness in thinking, I would choose that of an invalid: his money is time and he may spend it on Olympus. It will not suffice to be an amateur invalid. To my way of thinking, the perfect practitioner must be to all outward purposes already dead if he is to begin the perfect enjoyment of life. His serenity must not be disturbed by rumors of recovery; he must lie serene in his long chair in the sunshine. The world must be on the other side of the wall, and the wall must be so thick and so high that he cannot hear the roaring of the furnace fires and the screaming of the whistles. Peace—

Having read so far as the word “peace,” Bibbs suffered an interruption interesting as a coincidence of contrast. High voices sounded in the hall just outside his door; and it became evident that a woman’s quarrel was in progress, the parties to it having begun it in Edith’s room, and continuing it vehemently as they came out into the hall.