The Turmoil (15 page)

No one could help wishing to stay in a world that holds some of the people that are in this world. There are some so wonderful you do not understand how the dead COULD die. How could they let themselves? A falling building does not care who falls with it. It does not choose who shall be upon its roof and who shall not. Silence CAN be golden? Yes. But perhaps if a woman of the world should find herself by accident sitting beside a man for the length of time it must necessarily take two slow old horses to jog three miles, she might expect that man to say something of some sort! Even if she thought him a feeble hypochondriac, even if she had heard from others that he was a disappointment to his own people, even if she had seen for herself that he was a useless and irritating encumbrance everywhere, she might expect him at least to speak—she might expect him to open his mouth and try to make sounds, if he only barked. If he did not even try, but sat every step of the way as dumb as a frozen fish, she might THINK him a frozen fish. And she might be right. She might be right if she thought him about as pleasant a companion as—as Bildad the Shuhite!

Bibbs closed his note-book, replacing it in his trunk. Then, after a period of melancholy contemplation, he undressed, put on a dressing-gown and slippers, and went softly out into the hall—to his father’s door. Upon the floor was a tray which Bibbs had sent George, earlier in the evening, to place upon a table in Sheridan’s room—but the food was untouched. Bibbs stood listening outside the door for several minutes. There came no sound from within, and he went back to his own room and to bed.

In the morning he woke to a state of being hitherto unknown in his experience. Sometimes in the process of waking there is a little pause—sleep has gone, but coherent thought has not begun. It is a curious half-void, a glimpse of aphasia; and although the person experiencing it may not know for that instant his own name or age or sex, he may be acutely conscious of depression or elation. It is the moment, as we say, before we “remember”; and for the first time in Bibbs’s life it came to him bringing a vague happiness. He woke to a sense of new riches; he had the feeling of a boy waking to a birthday. But when the next moment brought him his memory, he found nothing that could explain his exhilaration. On the contrary, under the circumstances it seemed grotesquely unwarranted. However, it was a brief visitation and was gone before he had finished dressing. It left a little trail, the pleased recollection of it and the puzzle of it, which remained unsolved. And, in fact, waking happily in the morning is not usually the result of a drive home from a funeral. No wonder the sequence evaded Bibbs Sheridan!

His father had gone when he came down-stairs. “Went on down to ‘s office, jes’ same,” Jackson informed him. “Came sat breakfas’-table, all by ‘mself; eat nothin’. George bring nice breakfas’, but he di’n’ eat a thing. Yessuh, went on down-town, jes’ same he yoosta do. Yessuh, I reckon putty much ev’y-thing goin’ go on same as it yoosta do.”

It struck Bibbs that Jackson was right. The day passed as other days had passed. Mrs. Sheridan and Edith were in black, and Mrs. Sheridan cried a little, now and then, but no other external difference was to be seen. Edith was quiet, but not noticeably depressed, and at lunch proved herself able to argue with her mother upon the propriety of receiving calls in the earliest stages of “mourning.” Lunch was as usual—for Jim and his father had always lunched down-town—and the afternoon was as usual. Bibbs went for his drive, and his mother went with him, as she sometimes did when the weather was pleasant. Altogether, the usualness of things was rather startling to Bibbs.

During the drive Mrs. Sheridan talked fragmentarily of Jim’s childhood. “But you wouldn’t remember about that,” she said, after narrating an episode. “You were too little. He was always a good boy, just like that. And he’d save whatever papa gave him, and put it in the bank. I reckon it’ll just about kill your father to put somebody in his place as president of the Realty Company, Bibbs. I know he can’t move Roscoe over; he told me last week he’d already put as much on Roscoe as any one man could handle and not go crazy. Oh, it’s a pity—” She stopped to wipe her eyes. “It’s a pity you didn’t run more with Jim, Bibbs, and kind o’ pick up his ways. Think what it’d meant to papa now! You never did run with either Roscoe or Jim any, even before you got sick. Of course, you were younger; but it always DID seem queer—and you three bein’ brothers like that. I don’t believe I ever saw you and Jim sit down together for a good talk in my life.”

“Mother, I’ve been away so long,” Bibbs returned, gently. “And since I came home I—”

“Oh, I ain’t reproachin’ you, Bibbs,” she said. “Jim ain’t been home much of an evening since you got back—what with his work and callin’ and goin’ to the theater and places, and often not even at the house for dinner. Right the evening before he got hurt he had his dinner at some miser’ble rest’rant down by the Pump Works, he was so set on overseein’ the night work and gettin’ everything finished up right to the minute he told papa he would. I reckon you might ‘a’ put in more time with Jim if there’d been more opportunity, Bibbs. I expect you feel almost as if you scarcely really knew him right well.”

“I suppose I really didn’t, mother. He was busy, you see, and I hadn’t much to say about the things that interested him, because I don’t know much about them.”

“It’s a pity! Oh, it’s a pity!” she moaned. “And you’ll have to learn to know about ‘em NOW, Bibbs! I haven’t said much to you, because I felt it was all between your father and you, but I honestly do believe it will just kill him if he has to have any more trouble on top of all this! You mustn’t LET him, Bibbs—you mustn’t! You don’t know how he’s grieved over you, and now he can’t stand any more —he just can’t! Whatever he says for you to do, you DO it, Bibbs, you DO it! I want you to promise me you will.”

“I would if I could,” he said, sorrowfully.

“No, no! Why can’t you?” she cried, clutching his arm. “He wants you to go back to the machine-shop and—”

“And—‘like it!” said Bibbs.

“Yes, that’s it—to go in a cheerful spirit. Dr. Gurney said it wouldn’t hurt you if you went in a cheerful spirit—the doctor said that himself, Bibbs. So why can’t you do it? Can’t you do that much for your father? You ought to think what he’s done for YOU. You got a beautiful house to live in; you got automobiles to ride in; you got fur coats and warm clothes; you been taken care of all your life. And you don’t KNOW how he worked for the money to give all these things to you! You don’t DREAM what he had to go through and what he risked when we were startin’ out in life; and you never WILL know! And now this blow has fallen on him out of a clear sky, and you make it out to be a hardship to do like he wants you to! And all on earth he asks is for you to go back to the work in a cheerful spirit, so it won’t hurt you! That’s all he asks. Look, Bibbs, we’re gettin’ back near home, but before we get there I want you to promise me that you’ll do what he asks you to. Promise me!”

In her earnestness she cleared away her black veil that she might see him better, and it blew out on the smoky wind. He readjusted it for her before he spoke.

“I’ll go back in as cheerful a spirit as I can, mother,” he said.

“There!” she exclaimed, satisfied. “That’s a good boy! That’s all I wanted you to say.”

“Don’t give me any credit,” he said, ruefully. “There isn’t anything else for me to do.”

“Now, don’t begin talkin’ THAT way!”

“No, no,” he soothed her. “We’ll have to begin to make the spirit a cheerful one. We may—” They were turning into their own driveway as he spoke, and he glanced at the old house next door. Mary Vertrees was visible in the twilight, standing upon the front steps, bareheaded, the door open behind her. She bowed gravely.

“‘We may’—what?” asked Mrs. Sheridan, with a slight impatience.

“What is it, mother?”

“You said, ‘We may,’ and didn’t finish what you were sayin’.”

“Did I?” said Bibbs, blankly. “Well, what WERE we saying?”

“Of all the queer boys!” she cried. “You always were. Always! You haven’t forgot what you just promised me, have you?”

“No,” he answered, as the car stopped. “No, the spirit will be as cheerful as the flesh will let it, mother. It won’t do to behave like—”

His voice was low, and in her movement to descend from the car she failed to here his final words.

“Behave like who, Bibbs?”

“Nothing.”

But she was fretful in her grief. “You said it wouldn’t do to behave like SOMEBODY. Behave like WHO?”

“It was just nonsense,” he explained, turning to go in. “An obscure person I don’t think much of lately.”

“Behave like WHO?” she repeated, and upon his yielding to her petulant insistence, she made up her mind that the only thing to do was to tell Dr. Gurney about it.

“Like Bildad the Shuhite!” was what Bibbs said.

The outward usualness of things continued after dinner. It was Sheridan’s custom to read the evening paper beside the fire in the library, while his wife, sitting near by, either sewed (from old habit) or allowed herself to be repeatedly baffled by one of the simpler forms of solitaire. To-night she did neither, but sat in her customary chair, gazing at the fire, while Sheridan let the unfolded paper rest upon his lap, though now and then he lifted it, as if to read, and let it fall back upon his knees again. Bibbs came in noiselessly and sat in a corner, doing nothing; and from a “reception-room” across the hall an indistinct vocal murmur became just audible at intervals. Once, when this murmur grew louder, under stress of some irrepressible merriment, Edith’s voice could be heard—“Bobby, aren’t you awful!” and Sheridan glanced across at his wife appealingly.

She rose at once and went into the “reception-room”; there was a flurry of whispering, and the sound of tiptoeing in the hall—Edith and her suitor changing quarters to a more distant room. Mrs. Sheridan returned to her chair in the library.

“They won’t bother you any more, papa,” she said, in a comforting voice. “She told me at lunch he’d ‘phoned he wanted to come up this evening, and I said I thought he’d better wait a few days, but she said she’d already told him he could.” She paused, then added, rather guiltily: “I got kind of a notion maybe Roscoe don’t like him as much as he used to. Maybe—maybe you better ask Roscoe, papa.” And as Sheridan nodded solemnly, she concluded, in haste: “Don’t say I said to. I might be wrong about it, anyway.”

He nodded again, and they sat for some time in a silence which Mrs. Sheridan broke with a little sniff, having fallen into a reverie that brought tears. “That Miss Vertrees was a good girl,” she said. “SHE was all right.”

Her husband evidently had no difficulty in following her train of thought, for he nodded once more, affirmatively.

“Did you—How did you fix it about the—the Realty Company?” she faltered. “Did you—”

He rose heavily, helping himself to his feet by the arms of his chair. “I fixed it,” he said, in a husky voice. “I moved Cantwell up, and put Johnston in Cantwell’s place, and split up Johnston’s work among the four men with salaries high enough to take it.” He went to her, put his hand upon her shoulder, and drew a long, audible, tremulous breath. “It’s my bedtime, mamma; I’m goin’ up.” He dropped the hand from her shoulder and moved slowly away, but when he reached the door he stopped and spoke again, without turning to look at her. “The Realty Company’ll go right on just the same,” he said. “It’s like— it’s like sand, mamma. It puts me in mind of chuldern playin’ in a sand-pile. One of ‘em sticks his finger in the sand and makes a hole, and another of ‘em’ll pat the place with his hand, and all the little grains of sand run in and fill it up and settle against one another; and then, right away it’s flat on top again, and you can’t tell there ever was a hole there. The Realty Company’ll go on all right, mamma. There ain’t anything anywhere, I reckon, that wouldn’t go right on—just the same.”

And he passed out slowly into the hall; then they heard his heavy tread upon the stairs.

Mrs. Sheridan, rising to follow him, turned a piteous face to her son. “It’s so forlone,” she said, chokingly. “That’s the first time he spoke since he came in the house this evening. I know it must ‘a’ hurt him to hear Edith laughin’ with that Lamhorn. She’d oughtn’t to let him come, right the very first evening this way; she’d oughtn’t to done it! She just seems to lose her head over him, and it scares me. You heard what Sibyl said the other day, and—and you heard what—what—”

“What Edith said to Sibyl?” Bibbs finished the sentence for her.

“We CAN’T have any trouble o’ THAT kind!” she wailed. “Oh, it looks as if movin’ up to this New House had brought us awful bad luck! It scares me!” She put both her hands over her face. “Oh, Bibbs, Bibbs! if you only wasn’t so QUEER! If you could only been a kind of dependable son! I don’t know what we’re all comin’ to!” And, weeping, she followed her husband.

Bibbs gazed for a while at the fire; then he rose abruptly, like a man who has come to a decision, and briskly sought the room—it was called “the smoking-room”—where Edith sat with Mr. Lamhorn. They looked up in no welcoming manner, at Bibbs’s entrance, and moved their chairs to a less conspicuous adjacency.

“Good evening,” said Bibbs, pleasantly; and he seated himself in a leather easy-chair near them.

“What is it?” asked Edith, plainly astonished.

“Nothing,” he returned, smiling.

She frowned. “Did you want something?” she asked.

“Nothing in the world. Father and mother have gone upstairs; I sha’n’t be going up for several hours, and there didn’t seem to be anybody left for me to chat with except you and Mr. Lamhorn.”

“‘CHAT with’!” she echoed, incredulously.

“I can talk about almost anything,” said Bibbs with an air of genial politeness. “It doesn’t matter to ME. I don’t know much about business—if that’s what you happened to be talking about. But you aren’t in business, are you, Mr. Lamhorn.

“Not now,” returned Lamhorn, shortly.

“I’m not, either,” said Bibbs. “It was getting cloudier than usual, I noticed, just before dark, and there was wind from the southwest. Rain to-morrow, I shouldn’t be surprised.”