The Turmoil (35 page)

But what for? The old question came to Bibbs with a new despair. Here, where his eyes fell, had once been green fields and running brooks, and how had the kind earth been despoiled and disfigured! The pioneers had begun the work, but in their old age their orators had said for them that they had toiled and risked and sacrificed that their posterity might live in peace and wisdom, enjoying the fruits of the earth. Well, their posterity was here—and there was only turmoil. Where was the promised land? It had been promised by the soldiers of all the wars; it had been promised to this generation by the pioneers; but here was the very posterity to whom it had been promised, toiling and risking and sacrificing in turn—for what?

The harsh roar of the city came in through the open window, continuously beating upon Bibbs’s ear until he began to distinguish a pulsation in it—a broken and irregular cadence. It seemed to him that it was like a titanic voice, discordant, hoarse, rustily metallic—the voice of the god, Bigness. And the voice summoned Bibbs as it summoned all its servants.

“Come and work!” it seemed to yell. “Come and work for Me, all men! By your youth and your hope I summon you! By your age and your despair I summon you to work for Me yet a little, with what strength you have. By your love of home I summon you! By your love of woman I summon you! By your hope of children I summon you!

“You shall be blind slaves of Mine, blind to everything but Me, your Master and Driver! For your reward you shall gaze only upon my ugliness. You shall give your toil and your lives, you shall go mad for love and worship of my ugliness! You shall perish still worshipping Me, and your children shall perish knowing no other god!”

And then, as Bibbs closed the window down tight, he heard his father’s voice booming in the next room; he could not distinguish the words but the tone was exultant—and there came the THUMP! THUMP! of the maimed hand. Bibbs guessed that Sheridan was bragging of the city and of Bigness to some visitor from out-of-town.

And he thought how truly Sheridan was the high priest of Bigness. But with the old, old thought again, “What for?” Bibbs caught a glimmer of far, faint light. He saw that Sheridan had all his life struggled and conquered, and must all his life go on struggling and inevitably conquering, as part of a vast impulse not his own. Sheridan served blindly—but was the impulse blind? Bibbs asked himself if it was not he who had been in the greater hurry, after all. The kiln must be fired before the vase is glazed, and the Acropolis was not crowned with marble in a day.

Then the voice came to him again, but there was a strain in it as of some high music struggling to be born of the turmoil. “Ugly I am,” it seemed to say to him, “but never forget that I AM a god!” And the voice grew in sonorousness and in dignity. “The highest should serve, but so long as you worship me for my own sake I will not serve you. It is man who makes me ugly, by his worship of me. If man would let me serve him, I should be beautiful!”

Looking once more from the window, Bibbs sculptured for himself—in the vague contortions of the smoke and fog above the roofs—a gigantic figure with feet pedestaled upon the great buildings and shoulders disappearing in the clouds, a colossus of steel and wholly blackened with soot. But Bibbs carried his fancy further—for there was still a little poet lingering in the back of his head—and he thought that up over the clouds, unseen from below, the giant labored with his hands in the clean sunshine; and Bibbs had a glimpse of what he made there—perhaps for a fellowship of the children of the children that were children now—a noble and joyous city, unbelievably white—”

It was the telephone that called him from his vision. It rang fiercely.

He lifted the thing from his desk and answered—and as the small voice inside it spoke he dropped the receiver with a crash. He trembled violently as he picked it up, but he told himself he was wrong—he had been mistaken—yet it was a startlingly beautiful voice; startlingly kind, too, and ineffably like the one he hungered most to hear.

“Who?” he said, his own voice shaking—like his hand.

“Mary.”

He responded with two hushed and incredulous words: “IS IT?”

There was a little thrill of pathetic half-laughter in the instrument. “Bibbs—I wanted to—just to see if you—”

“Yes—Mary?”

“I was looking when you were so nearly run over. I saw it, Bibbs. They said you hadn’t been hurt, they thought, but I wanted to know for myself.”

“No, no, I wasn’t hurt at all—Mary. It was father who came nearer it. He saved me.”

“Yes, I saw; but you had fallen. I couldn’t get through the crowd until you had gone. And I wanted to KNOW.”

“Mary—would you—have minded?” he said.

There was a long interval before she answered.

“Yes.”

“Then why—”

“Yes, Bibbs?”

“I don’t know what to say,” he cried. “It’s so wonderful to hear your voice again—I’m shaking, Mary—I—I don’t know—I don’t know anything except that I AM talking to you! It IS you—Mary?”

“Yes, Bibbs!”

“Mary—I’ve seen you from my window at home—only five times since I —since then. You looked—oh, how can I tell you? It was like a man chained in a cave catching a glimpse of the blue sky, Mary. Mary, won’t you—let me see you again—near? I think I could make you really forgive me—you’d have to—”

“I DID—then.”

“No—not really—or you wouldn’t have said you couldn’t see me any more.”

“That wasn’t the reason.” The voice was very low.

“Mary,” he said, even more tremulously than before, “I can’t—you COULDN’T mean it was because—you can’t mean it was because you— care?”

There was no answer.

“Mary?” he called, huskily. “If you mean THAT—you’d let me see you—wouldn’t you?”

And now the voice was so low he could not be sure it spoke at all, but if it did, the words were, “Yes, Bibbs—dear.”

But the voice was not in the instrument—it was so gentle and so light, so almost nothing, it seemed to be made of air—and it came from the air.

Slowly and incredulously he turned—and glory fell upon his shining eyes. The door of his father’s room had opened.

Mary stood upon the threshold.

THE END

End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Turmoil, by Booth Tarkington