The Turmoil (28 page)

“WHAT!” Sheridan goggled at him like a zany.

“Your son Bibbs,” said the doctor, composedly, “Bibbs Sheridan has the kind and quantity of ‘gray matter’ that will make him a success in anything—if he ever wakes up! Personally I should prefer him to remain asleep. I like him that way. But the thousands of men fit for the life you want him to lead aren’t fit to do much with the life he OUGHT to lead. Blindly, he’s been fighting for the chance to lead it—he’s obeying something that begs to stay alive within him; and, blindly, he knows you’ll crush it out. You’ve set your will to do it. Let me tell you something more. You don’t know what you’ve become since Jim’s going thwarted you—and that’s what was uppermost, a bafflement stronger than your normal grief. You’re half mad with a consuming fury against the very self of the law—for it was the very self of the law that took Jim from you. That was a law concerning the cohesion of molecules. The very self of the law took Roscoe from you and gave Edith the certainty of beating you; and the very self of the law makes Bibbs deny you to-night. The LAW beats you. Haven’t you been whipped enough? But you want to whip the law—you’ve set yourself against it, to bend it to your own ends, to wield it and twist it—”

The voice broke from Sheridan’s heaving chest in a shout. “Yes! And by God, I will!”

“So Ajax defied the lightning,” said Gurney.

“I’ve heard that dam’-fool story, too,” Sheridan retorted, fiercely. “That’s for chuldern and niggers. It ain’t twentieth century, let me tell you! “Defied the lightning,’ did he, the jackass! If he’d been half a man he’d ‘a’ got away with it. WE don’t go showin’ off defyin’ the lightning—we hitch it up and make it work for us like a black-steer! A man nowadays would just as soon think o’ defyin’ a woodshed!”

“Well, what about Bibbs?” said Gurney. “Will you be a really big man now and—”

“Gurney, you know a lot about bigness!” Sheridan began to walk to and fro again, and the doctor returned gloomily to his chair. He had shot his bolt the moment he judged its chance to strike center was best, but the target seemed unaware of the marksman.

“I’m tryin’ to make a big man out o’ that poor truck yonder,” Sheridan went on, “and you step in, beggin’ me to let him be Lord knows what—I don’t! I suppose you figure it out that now I got a SON-IN-LAW, I mightn’t need a son! Yes, I got a son-in-law now—a spender!”

“Oh, put your hand back!” said Gurney, wearily.

There was a bronze inkstand upon the table. Sheridan put his right hand in the sling, but with his left he swept the inkstand from the table and halfway across the room—a comet with a destroying black tail. Mrs. Sheridan shrieked and sprang toward it.

“Let it lay!” he shouted, fiercely. “Let it lay!” And, weeping, she obeyed. “Yes, sir,” he went on, in a voice the more ominous for the sudden hush he put upon it. “I got a spender for a son-in-law! It’s wonderful where property goes, sometimes. There was ole man Tracy—you remember him, Doc—J. R. Tracy, solid banker. He went into the bank as messenger, seventeen years old; he was president at forty-three, and he built that bank with his life for forty years more. He was down there from nine in the morning until four in the afternoon the day before he died—over eighty! Gilt edge, that bank? It was diamond edge! He used to eat a bag o’ peanuts and an apple for lunch; but he wasn’t stingy—he was just livin’ in his business. He didn’t care for pie or automobiles—he had his bank. It was an institution, and it come pretty near bein’ the beatin’ heart o’ this town in its time. Well, that ole man used to pass one o’ these here turned-up-nose and turned-up-pants cigarette boys on the streets. Never spoke to him, Tracy didn’t. Speak to him? God! he wouldn’t ‘a’ coughed on him! He wouldn’t ‘a’ let him clean the cuspidors at the bank! Why, if he’d ‘a’ just seen him standin’ in FRONT the bank he’d ‘a’ had him run off the street. And yet all Tracy was doin’ every day of his life was workin’ for that cigarette boy! Tracy thought it was for the bank; he thought he was givin’ his life and his life-blood and the blood of his brain for the bank, but he wasn’t. It was every bit—from the time he went in at seventeen till he died in harness at eighty-three—it was every last lick of it just slavin’ for that turned-up-nose, turned-up-pants cigarette boy. AND TRACY DIDN’T EVEN KNOW HIS NAME! He died, not ever havin’ heard it, though he chased him off the front steps of his house once. The day after Tracy died his old-maid daughter married the cigarette—and there AIN’T any Tracy bank any more! And now”—his voice rose again—“and now I got a cigarette son-in-law!”

Gurney pointed to the flourishing right hand without speaking, and Sheridan once more returned it to the sling.

“My son-in-law likes Florida this winter,” Sheridan went on. “That’s good, and my son-in-law better enjoy it, because I don’t think he’ll be there next winter. They got twelve-thousand dollars to spend, and I hear it can be done in Florida by rich sons-in-law. When Roscoe’s woman got me to spend that much on a porch for their new house, Edith wouldn’t give me a minute’s rest till I turned over the same to her. And she’s got it, besides what I gave her to go East on. It’ll be gone long before this time next year, and when she comes home and leaves the cigarette behind—for good—she’ll get some more. MY name ain’t Tracy, and there ain’t goin’ to be any Tracy business in the Sheridan family. And there ain’t goin’ to be any college foundin’ and endowin’ and trusteein’, nor God-knows-what to keep my property alive when I’m gone! Edith’ll be back, and she’ll get a girl’s share when she’s through with that cigarette, but—”

“By the way,” interposed Gurney, “didn’t Mrs. Sheridan tell me that Bibbs warned you Edith would marry Lamhorn in New York?”

Sheridan went completely to pieces: he swore, while his wife screamed and stopped her ears. And as he swore he pounded the table with his wounded hand, and when the doctor, after storming at him ineffectively, sprang to catch and protect that hand, Sheridan wrenched it away, tearing the bandage. He hammered the table till it leaped.

“Fool!” he panted, choking. “If he’s shown gumption enough to guess right the first time in his life, it’s enough for me to begin learnin’ him on!” And, struggling with the doctor, he leaned toward Bibbs, thrusting forward his convulsed face, which was deathly pale. “My name ain’t Tracy, I tell you!” he screamed, hoarsely. “You give in, you stubborn fool! I’ve had my way with you before, and I’ll have my way with you now!”

Bibbs’s face was as white as his father’s, but he kept remembering that “splendid look” of Mary’s which he had told her would give him courage in a struggle, so that he would “never give up.”

“No. You can’t have your way,” he said. And then, obeying a significant motion of Gurney’s head, he went out quickly, leaving them struggling.

Mrs. Sheridan, in a wrapper, noiselessly opened the door of her husband’s room at daybreak the next morning, and peered within the darkened chamber. At the “old” house they had shared a room, but the architect had chosen to separate them at the New, and they had not known how to formulate an objection, although to both of them something seemed vaguely reprehensible in the new arrangement.

Sheridan did not stir, and she was withdrawing her head from the aperture when he spoke.

“Oh, I’m, AWAKE! Come in, if you want to, and shut the door.”

She came and sat by the bed. “I woke up thinkin’ about it,” she explained. “And the more I thought about it the surer I got I must be right, and I knew you’d be tormentin’ yourself if you was awake, so—well, you got plenty other troubles, but I’m just sure you ain’t goin’ to have the worry with Bibbs it looks like.”

“You BET I ain’t!” he grunted.

“Look how biddable he was about goin’ back to the Works,” she continued. “He’s a right good-hearted boy, really, and sometimes I honestly have to say he seems right smart, too. Now and then he’ll say something sounds right bright. ‘Course, most always it doesn’t, and a good deal of the time, when he says things, why, I have to feel glad we haven’t got company, because they’d think he didn’t have any gumption at all. Yet, look at the way he did when Jim—when Jim got hurt. He took right hold o’ things. ‘Course he’d been sick himself so much and all—and the rest of us never had, much, and we were kind o’ green about what to do in that kind o’ trouble—still, he did take hold, and everything went off all right; you’ll have to say that much, papa. And Dr. Gurney says he’s got brains, and you can’t deny but what the doctor’s right considerable of a man. He acts sleepy, but that’s only because he’s got such a large practice—he’s a pretty wide-awake kind of a man some ways. Well, what he says last night about Bibbs himself bein’ asleep, and how much he’d amount to if he ever woke up—that’s what I got to thinkin’ about. You heard him, papa; he says, ‘Bibbs’ll be a bigger business man than what Jim and Roscoe was put together—if he ever wakes up,’ he says. Wasn’t that exactly what he says?”

“I suppose so,” said Sheridan, without exhibiting any interest. “Gurney’s crazier’n Bibbs, but if he wasn’t—if what he says was true—what of it?”

“Listen, papa. Just suppose Bibbs took it into his mind to get married. You know where he goes all the time—”

“Oh, Lord, yes!” Sheridan turned over in the bed, his face to the wall, leaving visible of himself only the thick grizzle of his hair. “You better go back to sleep. He runs over there—every minute she’ll let him, I suppose. Go back to bed. There’s nothin’ in it.”

“WHY ain’t there?” she urged. “I know better—there is, too! You wait and see. There’s just one thing in the world that’ll wake the sleepiest young man alive up—yes, and make him JUMP up—and I don’t care who he is or how sound asleep it looks like he is. That’s when he takes it into his head to pick out some girl and settle down and have a home and chuldern of his own. THEN, I guess, he’ll go out after the money! You’ll see. I’ve known dozens o’ cases, and so’ve you—moony, no-‘count young men, all notions and talk, goin’ to be ministers, maybe or something; and there’s just this one thing takes it out of ‘em and brings ‘em right down to business. Well, I never could make out just what it is Bibbs wants to be, really; doesn’t seem he wants to be a minister exactly—he’s so far-away you can’t tell, and he never SAYS—but I know this is goin’ to get him right down to common sense. Now, I don’t say that Bibbs has got the idea in his head yet—‘r else he wouldn’t be talkin’ that fool-talk about nine dollars a week bein’ good enough for him to live on. But it’s COMIN’, papa, and he’ll JUMP for whatever you want to hand him out. He will! And I can tell you this much, too: he’ll want all the salary and stock he can get hold of, and he’ll hustle to keep gettin’ more. That girl’s the kind that a young husband just goes crazy to give things to! She’s pretty and fine-lookin’, and things look nice on her, and I guess she’d like to have ‘em about as well as the next. And I guess she isn’t gettin’ many these days, either, and she’ll be pretty ready for the change. I saw her with her sleeves rolled up at the kitchen window the other day, and Jackson told me yesterday their cook left two weeks ago, and they haven’t tried to hire another one. He says her and her mother been doin’ the housework a good while, and now they’re doin’ the cookin,’ too. ‘Course Bibbs wouldn’t know that unless she’s told him, and I reckon she wouldn’t; she’s kind o’ stiffish-lookin’, and Bibbs is too up in the clouds to notice anything like that for himself. They’ve never asked him to a meal in the house, but he wouldn’t notice that, either—he’s kind of innocent. Now I was thinkin’—you know, I don’t suppose we’ve hardly mentioned the girl’s name at table since Jim went, but it seems to me maybe if—”

Sheridan flung out his arms, uttering a sound half-groan, half-yawn. “You’re barkin’ up the wrong tree! Go on back to bed, mamma!”

“Why am I?” she demanded, crossly. “Why am I barkin’ up the wrong tree?”

“Because you are. There’s nothin’ in it.”

“I’ll bet you,” she said, rising—“I’ll bet you he goes to church with her this morning. What you want to bet?”

“Go back to bed,” he commanded. “I KNOW what I’m talkin’ about; there’s nothin’ in it, I tell you.”

She shook her head perplexedly. “You think because—because Jim was runnin’ so much with her it wouldn’t look right?”

“No. Nothin’ to do with it.”

“Then—do you know something about it that you ain’t told me?”

“Yes, I do,” he grunted. “Now go on. Maybe I can get a little sleep. I ain’t had any yet!”

“Well—” She went to the door, her expression downcast. “I thought maybe—but—” She coughed prefatorily. “Oh, papa, something else I wanted to tell you. I was talkin’ to Roscoe over the ‘phone last night when the telegram came, so I forgot to tell you, but—well, Sibyl wants to come over this afternoon. Roscoe says she has something she wants to say to us. It’ll be the first time she’s been out since she was able to sit up—and I reckon she wants to tell us she’s sorry for what happened. They expect to get off by the end o’ the week, and I reckon she wants to feel she’s done what she could to kind o’ make up. Anyway, that’s what he said. I ‘phoned him again about Edith, and he said it wouldn’t disturb Sibyl, because she’d been expectin’ it; she was sure all along it was goin’ to happen; and, besides, I guess she’s got all that foolishness pretty much out of her, bein’ so sick. But what I thought was, no use bein’ rough with her, papa—I expect she’s suffered a good deal—and I don’t think we’d ought to be, on Roscoe’s account. You’ll—you’ll be kind o’ polite to her, won’t you, papa?”

He mumbled something which was smothered under the coverlet he had pulled over his head.

“What?” she said, timidly. “I was just sayin’ I hoped you’d treat Sibyl all right when she comes, this afternoon. You will, won’t you, papa?”

He threw the coverlet off furiously. “I presume so!” he roared.

She departed guiltily.

But if he had accepted her proffered wager that Bibbs would go to church with Mary Vertrees that morning, Mrs. Sheridan would have lost. Nevertheless, Bibbs and Mary did certainly set out from Mr. Vertrees’s house with the purpose of going to church. That was their intention, and they had no other. They meant to go to church.

But it happened that they were attentively preoccupied in a conversation as they came to the church; and though Mary was looking to the right and Bibbs was looking to the left, Bibbs’s leftward glance converged with Mary’s rightward glance, and neither was looking far beyond the other at this time. It also happened that, though they were a little jostled among groups of people in the vicinity of the church, they passed this somewhat prominent edifice without being aware of their proximity to it, and they had gone an incredible number of blocks beyond it before they discovered their error. However, feeling that they might be embarrassingly late if they returned, they decided that a walk would make them as good. It was a windless winter morning, with an inch of crisp snow over the ground. So they walked, and for the most part they were silent, but on their way home, after they had turned back at noon, they began to be talkative again.