what he has grubbed, and that has been his life and his love and
his god. He cannot take that god with him when he dies. I wonder
if the worthy gods are those we can take with us.
Midas must teach all to be as Midas; the young must be raised in
his religion —
The manuscript ended there, and Sheridan was not anxious for more. He crumpled the sheets into a ball, depositing it (with vigor) in a waste-basket beside him; then, rising, he consulted a Cyclopedia of Names, which a book-agent had somehow sold to him years before; a volume now first put to use for the location of “Midas.” Having read the legend, Sheridan walked up and down the spacious office, exhaling the breath of contempt. “Dam’ fool!” he mumbled. But this was no new thought, nor was the contrariness of Bibbs’s notes a surpise to him; and presently he dismissed the matter from his mind.
He felt very lonely, and this was, daily, his hardest hour. For a long time he and Jim had lunched together habitually. Roscoe preferred a club luncheon, but Jim and his father almost always went to a small restaurant near the Sheridan Building, where they spent twenty minutes in the consumption of food, and twenty in talk, with cigars. Jim came for his father every day, at five minutes after twelve, and Sheridan was again in his office at five minutes before one. But now that Jim no longer came, Sheridan remained alone in his office; he had not gone out to lunch since Jim’s death, nor did he have anything sent to him — he fasted until evening.
It was the time he missed Jim personally the most — the voice and eyes and handshake, all brisk and alert, all business-like. But these things were not the keenest in Sheridan’s grief; his sense of loss went far deeper. Roscoe was dependable, a steady old wheel-horse, and that was a great comfort; but it was in Jim that Sheridan had most happily perceived his own likeness. Jim was the one who would have been surest to keep the great property growing greater, year by year. Sheridan had fallen asleep, night after night, picturing what the growth would be under Jim. He had believed that Jim was absolutely certain to be one of the biggest men in the country. Well, it was all up to Roscoe now!
That reminded him of a question he had in mind to ask Roscoe. It was a question Sheridan considered of no present importance, but his wife had suggested it — though vaguely — and he had meant to speak to Roscoe about it. However, Roscoe had not come into his father’s office for several days, and when Sheridan had seen his son at home there had been no opportunity.
He waited until the greater part of his day’s work was over, toward four o’clock, and then went down to Roscoe’s office, which was on a lower floor. He found several men waiting for business interviews in an outer room of the series Roscoe occupied; and he supposed that he would find his son busy with others, and that his question would have to be postponed, but when he entered the door marked “R. C. Sheridan. Private,” Roscoe was there alone.
He was sitting with his back to the door, his feet on a window-sill, and he did not turn as his father opened the door.
“Some pretty good men out there waitin’ to see you, my boy,” said Sheridan. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” Roscoe answered indistinctly, not moving.
“Well, I guess that’s all right, too. I let ’em wait sometimes myself! I just wanted to ask you a question, but I expect it’ll keep, if you’re workin’ something out in your mind!”
Roscoe made no reply; and his father, who had turned to the door, paused with his hand on the knob, staring curiously at the motionless figure in the chair. Usually the son seemed pleased and eager when he came to the office. “You’re all right, ain’t you?” said Sheridan. “Not sick, are you?”
“No.”
Sheridan was puzzled; then, abruptly, he decided to ask his question. “I wanted to talk to you about that young Lamhorn,” he said. “I guess your mother thinks he’s comin’ to see Edith pretty often, and you known him longer’n any of us, so—”
“I won’t,” said Roscoe, thickly— “I won’t say a dam’ thing about him!”
Sheridan uttered an exclamation and walked quickly to a position near the window where he could see his son’s face. Roscoe’s eyes were bloodshot and vacuous; his hair was disordered, his mouth was distorted, and he was deathly pale. The father stood aghast.
“By George!” he muttered. “ROSCOE!”
“My name,” said Roscoe. “Can’ help that.”
“ROSCOE!” Blank astonishment was Sheridan’s first sensation. Probably nothing in the world could have more amazed his than to find Roscoe — the steady old wheel-horse — in this condition. “How’d you GET this way?” he demanded. “You caught cold and took too much for it?”
For reply Roscoe laughed hoarsely. “Yeuh! Cold! I been drinkun all time, lately. Firs’ you notice it?”
“By George!” cried Sheridan. “I THOUGHT I’d smelt it on you a good deal lately, but I wouldn’t ‘a’ believed you’d take more’n was good for you. Boh! To see you like a common hog!”
Roscoe chuckled and threw out his right arm in a meaningless gesture. “Hog!” he repeated, chuckling.
“Yes, a hog!” said Sheridan, angrily. “In business hours! I don’t object to anybody’s takin’ a drink if you wants to, out o’ business hours; nor, if a man keeps his work right up to the scratch, I wouldn’t be the one to baste him if he got good an’ drunk once in two, three years, maybe. It ain’t MY way. I let it alone, but I never believed in forcin’ my way on a grown-up son in moral matters. I guess I was wrong! You think them men out there are waitin’ to talk business with a drunkard? You think you can come to your office and do business drunk? By George! I wonder how often this has been happening and me not on to it! I’ll have a look over your books to-morrow, and I’ll—”
Roscoe stumbled to his feet, laughing wildly, and stood swaying, contriving to hold himself in position by clutching the back of the heavy chair in which he had been sitting.
“Hoo — hoorah!” he cried. “‘S my principles, too. Be drunkard all you want to — outside business hours. Don’ for Gossake le’n’thing innerfere business hours! Business! Thassit! You’re right, father. Drink! Die! L’everything go to hell, but DON’ let innerfere business!”
Sheridan had seized the telephone upon Roscoe’s desk, and was calling his own office, overhead. “Abercrombie? Come down to my son Roscoe’s suite and get rid of some gentlemen that are waitin’ there to see him in room two-fourteen. There’s Maples and Schirmer and a couple o’ fellows on the Kinsey business. Tell ’em something’s come up I have to go over with Roscoe, and tell ’em to come back day after to-morrow at two. You needn’t come in to let me know they’re gone; we don’t want to be disturbed. Tell Pauly to call my house and send Claus down here with a closed car. We may have to go out. Tell him to hustle, and call me at Roscoe’s room as soon as the car gets here. ‘T’s all!”
Roscoe had laughed bitterly throughout this monologue. “Drunk in business hours! Thass awf’l! Mus’n’ do such thing! Mus’n’ get drunk, mus’n’ gamble, mus’n’ kill ‘nybody — not in business hours! All right any other time. Kill ‘nybody you want to— ‘s long ‘tain’t in business hours! Fine! Mus’n’ have any trouble ‘t’ll innerfere business. Keep your trouble ‘t home. Don’ bring it to th’ office. Might innerfere business! Have funerals on Sunday — might innerfere business! Don’ let your wife innerfere business! Keep all, all, ALL your trouble an’ your meanness, an’ your trad — your tradegy — keep ’em ALL for home use! If you got die, go on die ‘t home — don’ die round th’ office! Might innerfere business!”
Sheridan picked up a newspaper from Roscoe’s desk, and sat down with his back to his son, affecting to read. Roscoe seemed to be unaware of his father’s significant posture.
“You know wh’ I think?” he went on. “I think Bibbs only one the fam’ly any ‘telligence at all. Won’ work, an’ di’n’ get married. Jim worked, an’ he got killed. I worked, an’ I got married. Look at me! Jus’ look at me, I ask you. Fine ‘
dustriss young business man. Look whass happen’ to me! Fine!” He lifted his hand from the sustaining chair in a deplorable gesture, and, immediately losing his balance, fell across the chair and caromed to the floor with a crash, remaining prostrate for several minutes, during which Sheridan did not relax his apparent attention to the newspaper. He did not even look round at the sound of Roscoe’s fall.
Roscoe slowly climbed to an upright position, pulling himself up by holding to the chair. He was slightly sobered outwardly, having progressed in the prostrate interval to a state of befuddlement less volatile. He rubbed his dazed eyes with the back of his left hand.
“What — what you ask me while ago?” he said.
“Nothin’.”
“Yes, you did. What — what was it?”
“Nothin’. You better sit down.”
“You ask’ me what I thought about Lamhorn. You did ask me that. Well, I won’t tell you. I won’t say dam’ word ‘bout him!”
The telephone-bell tinkled. Sheridan placed the receiver to his ear and said, “Right down.” Then he got Roscoe’s coat and hat from a closet and brought them to his son. “Get into this coat,” he said. “You’re goin’ home.”
“All ri’,” Roscoe murmured, obediently.
They went out into the main hall by a side door, not passing through the outer office; and Sheridan waited for an empty elevator, stopped it, and told the operator to take on no more passengers until they reached the ground floor. Roscoe walked out of the building and got into the automobile without lurching, and twenty minutes later walked into his own house in the same manner, neither he nor his father having spoken a word in the interval.
Sheridan did not go in with him; he went home, and to his own room without meeting any of his family. But as he passed Bibbs’s door he heard from within the sound of a cheerful young voice humming jubilant fragments of song:
WHO looks a mustang in the eye?...
With a leap from the ground
To the saddle in a bound.
And away — and away!
Hi-yay!
It was the first time in Sheridan’s life that he had ever detected any musical symptom whatever in Bibbs — he had never even heard him whistle — and it seemed the last touch of irony that the useless fool should be merry to-day.
To Sheridan it was Tom o’ Bedlam singing while the house burned; and he did not tarry to enjoy the melody, but went into his own room and locked the door.
CHAPTER XIX
HE EMERGED ONLY upon a second summons to dinner, two hours later, and came to the table so white and silent that his wife made her anxiety manifest and was but partially reassured by his explanation that his lunch had “disagreed” with him a little.
Presently, however, he spoke effectively. Bibbs, whose appetite had become hearty, was helping himself to a second breast of capon from white-jacket’s salver. “Here’s another difference between Midas and chicken,” Sheridan remarked, grimly. “Midas can eat rooster, but rooster can’t eat Midas. I reckon you overlooked that. Midas looks to me like he had the advantage there.”
Bibbs retained enough presence of mind to transfer the capon breast to his plate without dropping it and to respond, “Yes — he crows over it.”
Having returned his antagonists’s fire in this fashion, he blushed — for he could blush distinctly now — and his mother looked upon him with pleasure, thought the reference to Midas and roosters was of course jargon to her. “Did you ever see anybody improve the way that child has!” she exclaimed. “I declare, Bibbs, sometimes lately you look right handsome!”
“He’s got to be such a gadabout,” Edith giggled.
“I found something of his on the floor up-stairs this morning, before anybody was up,” said Sheridan. “I reckon if people lose things in this house and expect to get ’em back, they better get up as soon as I do.”
“What was it he lost?” asked Edith.
“He knows!” her father returned. “Seems to me like I forgot to bring it home with me. I looked it over — thought probably it was something pretty important, belongin’ to a busy man like him.” He affected to search his pockets. “What DID I do with it, now? Oh yes! Seems to me like I remember leavin’ it down at the office — in the waste-basket.”
“Good place for it,” Bibbs murmured, still red.
Sheridan gave him a grin. “Perhaps pretty soon you’ll be gettin’ up early enough to find things before I do!”
It was a threat, and Bibbs repeated the substance of it, later in the evening, to Mary Vertrees — they had come to know each other that well.
“My time’s here at last,” he said, as they sat together in the melancholy gas-light of the room which had been denuded of its piano. That removal had left an emptiness so distressing to Mr. and Mrs. Vertrees that neither of them had crossed the threshold since the dark day; but the gas-light, though from a single jet, shed no melancholy upon Bibbs, nor could any room seem bare that knew the glowing presence of Mary. He spoke lightly, not sadly.
“Yes, it’s come. I’ve shirked and put off, but I can’t shirk and put off any longer. It’s really my part to go to him — at least it would save my face. He means what he says, and the time’s come to serve my sentence. Hard labor for life, I think.”
Mary shook her head. “I don’t think so. He’s too kind.”
“You think my father’s KIND?” And Bibbs stared at her.
“Yes. I’m sure of it. I’ve felt that he has a great, brave heart. It’s only that he has to be kind in his own way — because he can’t understand any other way.”
“Ah yes,” said Bibbs. “If that’s what you mean by ‘kind’!”
She looked at him gravely, earnest concern in her friendly eyes. “It’s going to be pretty hard for you, isn’t it?”
“Oh — self-pity!” he returned, smiling. “This has been just the last flicker of revolt. Nobody minds work if he likes the kind of work. There’d be no loafers in the world if each man found the thing that he could do best; but the only work I happen to want to do is useless — so I have to give it up. To-morrow I’ll be a day-laborer.”
“What is it like — exactly?”
“I get up at six,” he said. “I have a lunch-basket to carry with me, which is aristocratic and no advantage. The other workmen have tin buckets, and tin buckets are better. I leave the house at six-thirty, and I’m at work in my overalls at seven. I have an hour off at noon, and work again from one till five.”
“But the work itself?”
“It wasn’t muscularly exhausting — not at all. They couldn’t give me a heavier job because I wasn’t good enough.”
“But what will you do? I want to know.”
“When I left,” said Bibbs, “I was ‘on’ what they call over there a ‘clipping-machine,’ in one of the ‘by-products’ departments, and that’s what I’ll be sent back to.”
“But what is it?” she insisted.
Bibbs explained. “It’s very simple and very easy. I feed long strips of zinc into a pair of steel jaws, and the jaws bite the zinc into little circles. All I have to do is to see that the strip goes into the jaws at a certain angle — and yet I was a very bad hand at it.”
He had kept his voice cheerful as he spoke, but he had grown a shade paler, and there was a latent anguish deep in his eyes. He may have known it and wished her not to see it, for he turned away.
“You do that all day long?” she asked, and as he nodded, “It seems incredible!” she exclaimed. “YOU feeding a strip of zinc into a machine nine hours a day! No wonder—” She broke off, and then, after a keen glance at his face, she said: “I should think you WOULD have been a ‘bad hand at it’!”
He laughed ruefully. “I think it’s the noise, though I’m ashamed to say it. You see, it’s a very powerful machine, and there’s a sort of rhythmical crashing — a crash every time the jaws bite off a circle.”
“How often is that?”
“The thing should make about sixty-eight disks a minute
— a little more than one a second.”
“And you’re close to it?”
“Oh, the workman has to sit in its lap,” he said, turning to her more gaily. “The others don’t mind. You see, it’s something wrong with me. I have an idiotic way of flinching from the confounded thing — I flinch and duck a little every time the crash comes, and I couldn’t get over it. I was a treat to the other workmen in that room; they’ll be glad to see me back. They used to laugh at me all day long.”
Mary’s gaze was averted from Bibbs now; she sat with her elbow resting on the arm of the chair, her lifted hand pressed against her cheek. She was staring at the wall, and her eyes had a burning brightness in them.
“It doesn’t seem possible any one could do that to you,” she said, in a low voice. “No. He’s not kind. He ought to be proud to help you to the leisure to write books; it should be his greatest privilege to have them published for you—”
“Can’t you SEE him?” Bibbs interrupted, a faint ripple of hilarity in his voice. “If he could understand what you’re saying — and if you can imagine his taking such a notion, he’d have had R. T. Bloss put up posters all over the country: ‘Read B. Sheridan. Read the Poet with a Punch!’ No. It’s just as well he never got the — But what’s the use? I’ve never written anything worth printing, and I never shall.”
“You could!” she said.
“That’s because you’ve never seen the poor little things I’ve tried to do.”
“You wouldn’t let me, but I KNOW you could! Ah, it’s a pity!”
“It isn’t,” said BIBBS, honestly. “I never could — but you’re the kindest lady in this world, Miss Vertrees.”
She gave him a flashing glance, and it was as kind as he said she was. “That sounds wrong,” she said, impulsively. “I mean ‘Miss Vertrees.’ I’ve thought of you by your first name ever since I met you. Wouldn’t you rather call me ‘Mary’?”
Bibbs was dazzled; he drew a long, deep breath and did not speak.
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 174
