Collected Works of Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  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.

  CHAPTER XIV

  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, affirmative
ly.

  “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 up-stairs; 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.”

  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 be 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 as 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 m
aking 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!”