The Turmoil (16 page)

He seemed to feel that he had begun a conversation the support of which had now become the pleasurable duty of other parties; and he sat expectantly, looking first at his sister, then at Lamhorn, as if implying that it was their turn to speak. Edith returned his gaze with a mixture of astonishment and increasing anger, while Mr. Lamhorn was obviously disturbed, though Bibbs had been as considerate as possible in presenting the weather as a topic. Bibbs had perceived that Lamhorn had nothing in his mind at any time except “personalities”—he could talk about people and he could make love. Bibbs, wishing to be courteous, offered the weather.

Lamhorn refused it, and concluded from Bibbs’s luxurious attitude in the leather chair that this half-crazy brother was a permanent fixture for the rest of the evening. There was not reason to hope that he would move, and Lamhorn found himself in danger of looking silly.

“I was just going,” he said, rising.

“Oh NO!” Edith cried, sharply.

“Yes. Good night! I think I—”

“Too bad,” said Bibbs, genially, walking to the door with the visitor, while Edith stood staring as the two disappeared in the hall. She heard Bibbs offering to “help” Lamhorn with his overcoat and the latter rather curtly declining assistance, these episodes of departure being followed by the closing of the outer door. She ran into the hall.

“What’s the matter with you?” she cried, furiously. “What do you MEAN? How did you dare come in there when you knew—”

Her voice broke; she made a gesture of rage and despair, and ran up the stairs, sobbing. She fled to her mother’s room, and when Bibbs came up, a few minutes later, Mrs. Sheridan met him at his door.

“Oh, Bibbs,” she said, shaking her head woefully, “you’d oughtn’t to distress your sister! She says you drove that young man right out of the house. You’d ought to been more considerate.”

Bibbs smiled faintly, noting that Edith’s door was open, with Edith’s naive shadow motionless across its threshold. “Yes,” he said. “He doesn’t appear to much of a ‘man’s man.’ He ran at just a glimpse of one.”

Edith’s shadow moved; her voice came quavering: “You call yourself one?”

“No, no,” he answered. “I said, ‘just a glimpse of one.’ I didn’t claim—” But her door slammed angrily; and he turned to his mother.

“There,” he said, sighing. “That’s almost the first time in my life I ever tried to be a man of action, mother, and I succeeded perfectly in what I tried to do. As a consequence I feel like a horse-thief!”

“You hurt her feelin’s,” she groaned. “You must ‘a’ gone at it too rough, Bibbs.”

He looked upon her wanly. “That’s my trouble, mother,” he murmured. “I’m a plain, blunt fellow. I have rough ways, and I’m a rough man.”

For once she perceived some meaning in his queerness. “Hush your nonsense!” she said, good-naturedly, the astral of a troubled smile appearing. “You go to bed.”

He kissed her and obeyed.

Edith gave him a cold greeting the next morning at the breakfast-table.

“You mustn’t do that under a misapprehension,” he warned her, when they were alone in the dining-room.

“Do what under a what?” she asked.

“Speak to me. I came into the smoking-room last night ‘on purpose,’” he told her, gravely. “I have a prejudice against that young man.”

She laughed. “I guess you think it means a great deal who you have prejudices against!” In mockery she adopted the manner of one who implores. “Bibbs, for pity’s sake PROMISE me, DON’T use YOUR influence with papa against him!” And she laughed louder.

“Listen,” he said, with peculiar earnestness. “I’ll tell you now, because—because I’ve decided I’m one of the family.” And then, as if the earnestness were too heavy for him to carry it further, he continued, in his usual tone, “I’m drunk with power, Edith.”

“What do you want to tell me?” she demanded, brusquely.

“Lamhorn made love to Sibyl,” he said.

Edith hooted. “SHE did to HIM! And because you overheard that spat between us the other day when I the same of accused her of it, and said something like that to you afterward—”

“No,” he said, gravely. “I KNOW.”

“How?”

“I was there, one day a week ago, with Roscoe, and I heard Sibyl and Lamhorn—”

Edith screamed with laughter. “You were with ROSCOE—and you heard Lamhorn making love to Sibyl!”

“No. I heard them quarreling.”

“You’re funnier than ever, Bibbs!” she cried. “You say he made love to her because you heard them quarreling!”

“That’s it. If you want to know what’s ‘between’ people, you can—by the way they quarrel.”

“You’ll kill me, Bibbs! What were they quarreling about?”

“Nothing. That’s how I knew. People who quarrel over nothing!—it’s always certain—”

Edith stopped laughing abruptly, but continued her mockery. “You ought to know. You’ve had so much experience, yourself!”

“I haven’t any, Edith,” he said. “My life has been about as exciting as an incubator chicken’s. But I look out through the glass at things.”

“Well, then,” she said, “if you look out through the glass you must know what effect such stuff would have upon ME!” She rose, visibly agitated. “What if it WAS true?” she demanded, bitterly. “What if it was true a hundred times over? You sit there with your silly face half ready to giggle and half ready to sniffle, and tell me stories like that, about Sibyl picking on Bobby Lamhorn and worrying him to death, and you think it matters to ME? What if I already KNEW all about their ‘quarreling’? What if I understood WHY she—” She broke off with a violent gesture, a sweep of her arm extended at full length, as if she hurled something to the ground. “Do you think a girl that really cared for a man would pay any attention to THAT? Or to YOU, Bibbs Sheridan!”

He looked at her steadily, and his gaze was as keen as it was steady. She met it with unwavering pride. Finally he nodded slowly, as if she had spoken and he meant to agree with what she said.

“Ah, yes,” he said. “I won’t come into the smoking-room again. I’m sorry, Edith. Nobody can make you see anything now. You’ll never see until you see for yourself. The rest of us will do better to keep out of it—especially me!”

“That’s sensible,” she responded, curtly. “You’re most surprising of all when you’re sensible, Bibbs.”

“Yes,” he sighed. “I’m a dull dog. Shake hands and forgive me, Edith.”

Thawing so far as to smile, she underwent this brief ceremony, and George appeared, summoning Bibbs to the library; Dr. Gurney was waiting there, he announced. And Bibbs gave his sister a shy but friendly touch upon the shoulder as a complement to the handshaking, and left her.

Dr. Gurney was sitting by the log fire, alone in the room, and he merely glanced over his shoulder when his patient came in. He was not over fifty, in spite of Sheridan’s habitual “ole Doc Gurney.” He was gray, however, almost as thin as Bibbs, and nearly always he looked drowsy.

“Your father telephoned me yesterday afternoon, Bibbs,” he said, not rising. “Wants me to ‘look you over’ again. Come around here in front of me—between me and the fire. I want to see if I can see through you.”

“You mean you’re too sleepy to move,” returned Bibbs, complying. “I think you’ll notice that I’m getting worse.”

“Taken on about twelve pounds,” said Gurney. “Thirteen, maybe.”

“Twelve.”

“Well, it won’t do.” The doctor rubbed his eyelids. “You’re so much better I’ll have to use some machinery on you before we can know just where you are. You come down to my place this afternoon. Walk down —all the way. I suppose you know why your father wants to know.”

Bibbs nodded. “Machine-shop.”

“Still hate it?”

Bibbs nodded again.

“Don’t blame you!” the doctor grunted. “Yes, I expect it’ll make a lump in your gizzard again. Well, what do you say? Shall I tell him you’ve got the old lump there yet? You still want to write, do you?”

“What’s the use?” Bibbs said, smiling ruefully. “My kind of writing!”

“Yes,” the doctor agreed. “I suppose it you broke away and lived on roots and berries until you began to ‘attract the favorable attention of editors’ you might be able to hope for an income of four or five hundred dollars a year by the time you’re fifty.”

“That’s about it,” Bibbs murmured.

“Of course I know what you want to do,” said Gurney, drowsily. “You don’t hate the machine-shop only; you hate the whole show—the noise and jar and dirt, the scramble—the whole bloomin’ craze to ‘get on.’ You’d like to go somewhere in Algiers, or to Taormina, perhaps, and bask on a balcony, smelling flowers and writing sonnets. You’d grow fat on it and have a delicate little life all to yourself. Well, what do you say? I can lie like sixty, Bibbs! Shall I tell your father he’ll lose another of his boys if you don’t go to Sicily?”

“I don’t want to go to Sicily,” said Bibbs. “I want to stay right here.”

The doctor’s drowsiness disappeared for a moment, and he gave his patient a sharp glance. “It’s a risk,” he said. “I think we’ll find you’re so much better he’ll send you back to the shop pretty quick. Something’s got hold of you lately; you’re not quite so lackadaisical as you used to be. But I warn you: I think the shop will knock you just as it did before, and perhaps even harder, Bibbs.”

He rose, shook himself, and rubbed his eyelids. “Well, when we go over you this afternoon what are we going to say about it?”

“Tell him I’m ready,” said Bibbs, looking at the floor.

“Oh no,” Gurney laughed. “Not quite yet; but you may be almost. We’ll see. Don’t forget I said to walk down.”

And when the examination was concluded, that afternoon, the doctor informed Bibbs that the result was much too satisfactory to be pleasing. “Here’s a new ‘situation’ for a one-act farce,” he said, gloomily, to his next patient when Bibbs had gone. “Doctor tells a man he’s well, and that’s his death sentence, likely. Dam’ funny world!”

Bibbs decided to walk home, though Gurney had not instructed him upon this point. In fact, Gurney seemed to have no more instructions on any point, so discouraging was the young man’s improvement. It was a dingy afternoon, and the smoke was evident not only to Bibbs’s sight, but to his nostrils, though most of the pedestrians were so saturated with the smell they could no longer detect it. Nearly all of them walked hurriedly, too intent upon their destinations to be more than half aware of the wayside; they wore the expressions of people under a vague yet constant strain. They were all lightly powdered, inside and out, with fine dust and grit from the hard-paved streets, and they were unaware of that also. They did not even notice that they saw the smoke, though the thickened air was like a shrouding mist. And when Bibbs passed the new “Sheridan Apartments,” now almost completed, he observed that the marble of the vestibule was already streaky with soot, like his gloves, which were new.

That recalled to him the faint odor of gasolene in the coupe on the way from his brother’s funeral, and this incited a train of thought which continued till he reached the vicinity of his home. His route was by a street parallel to that on which the New House fronted, and in his preoccupation he walked a block farther than he intended, so that, having crossed to his own street, he approached the New House from the north, and as he came to the corner of Mr. Vertrees’s lot Mr. Vertrees’s daughter emerged from the front door and walked thoughtfully down the path to the old picket gate. She was unconscious of the approach of the pedestrian from the north, and did not see him until she had opened the gate and he was almost beside her. Then she looked up, and as she saw him she started visibly. And if this thing had happened to Robert Lamhorn, he would have had a thought far beyond the horizon of faint-hearted Bibbs’s thoughts. Lamhorn, indeed, would have spoken his thought. He would have said: “You jumped because you were thinking of me!”

Mary was the picture of a lady flustered. She stood with one hand closing the gate behind her, and she had turned to go in the direction Bibbs was walking. There appeared to be nothing for it but that they should walk together, at least as far as the New House. But Bibbs had paused in his slow stride, and there elapsed an instant before either spoke or moved—it was no longer than that, and yet it sufficed for each to seem to say, by look and attitude, “Why, it’s YOU!”

Then they both spoke at once, each hurriedly pronouncing the other’s name as if about to deliver a message of importance. Then both came to a stop simultaneously, but Bibbs made a heroic effort, and as they began to walk on together he contrived to find his voice.

“I—I—hate a frozen fish myself,” he said. “I think three miles was too long for you to put up with one.”

“Good gracious!” she cried, turning to him a glowing face from which restraint and embarrassment had suddenly fled. “Mr. Sheridan, you’re lovely to put it that way. But it’s always the girl’s place to say it’s turning cooler! I ought to have been the one to show that we didn’t know each other well enough not to say SOMETHING! It was an imposition for me to have made you bring me home, and after I went into the house I decided I should have walked. Besides, it wasn’t three miles to the car-line. I never thought of it!”

“No,” said Bibbs, earnestly. “I didn’t, either. I might have said something if I’d thought of anything. I’m talking now, though; I must remember that, and not worry about it later. I think I’m talking, though it doesn’t sound intelligent even to me. I made up my mind that if I ever met you again I’d turn on my voice and keep it going, no mater what it said. I—”

She interrupted him with laughter, and Mary Vertrees’s laugh was one which Bibbs’s father had declared, after the house-warming, “a cripple would crawl five miles to hear.” And at the merry lilting of it Bibbs’s father’s son took heart to forget some of his trepidation. “I’ll be any kind of idiot,” he said, “if you’ll laugh at me some more. It won’t be difficult for me.”

She did; and Bibbs’s cheeks showed a little actual color, which Mary perceived. It recalled to her, by contrast, her careless and irritated description of him to her mother just after she had seen him for the first time. “Rather tragic and altogether impossible.” It seemed to her now that she must have been blind.

They had passed the New House without either of them showing—or possessing—any consciousness that it had been the destination of one of them.