Collected Works of Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  “But, papa,” Mrs. Sheridan began, “if Edie says it was all Sibyl’s fault, makin’ up to him, and he never encouraged her much, nor—”

  “‘S enough!” he roared. “He keeps off these premises! And if any of you so much as ever speak his name to me again—”

  But Edith screamed, clapping her hands over her ears to shut out the sound of his voice, and ran up-stairs, sobbing loudly, followed by her mother. However, Mrs. Sheridan descended a few minutes later and joined her husband in the library. Bibbs, still sitting in his gold chair, saw her pass, roused himself from reverie, and strolled in after her.

  “She locked her door,” said Mrs. Sheridan, shaking her head woefully. “She wouldn’t even answer me. They wasn’t a sound from her room.”

  “Well,” said her husband, “she can settle her mind to it. She never speaks to that fellow again, and if he tries to telephone her to-morrow — Here! You tell the help if he calls up to ring off and say it’s my orders. No, you needn’t. I’ll tell ’em myself.”

  “Better not,” said Bibbs, gently.

  His father glared at him.

  “It’s no good,” said Bibbs. “Mother, when you were in love with father—”

  “My goodness!” she cried. “You ain’t a-goin’ to compare your father to that—”

  “Edith feels about him just what you did about father,” said Bibbs. “And if YOUR father had told you—”

  “I won’t LISTEN to such silly talk!” she declared, angrily.

  “So you’re handin’ out your advice, are you, Bibbs?” said Sheridan. “What is it?”

  “Let her see him all she wants.”

  “You’re a—” Sheridan gave it up. “I don’t know what to call you!”

  “Let her see him all she wants,” Bibbs repeated, thoughtfully. “You’re up against something too strong for you. If Edith were a weakling you’d have a chance this way, but she isn’t. She’s got a lot of your determination, father, and with what’s going on inside of her she’ll beat you. You can’t keep her from seeing him, as long as she feels about him the way she does now. You can’t make her think less of him, either. Nobody can. Your only chance is that she’ll do it for herself, and if you give her time and go easy she probably will. Marriage would do it for her quickest, but that’s just what you don’t want, and as you DON’T want it, you’d better—”

  “I can’t stand any more!” Sheridan burst out. “If it’s come to BIBBS advisin’ me how to run this house I better resign. Mamma, where’s that nigger George? Maybe HE’S got some plan how I better manage my family. Bibbs, for God’s sake go and lay down! ‘Let her see him all she wants’! Oh, Lord! here’s wisdom; here’s—”

  “Bibbs,” said Mrs. Sheridan, “if you haven’t got anything to do, you might step over and take Sibyl’s wraps home — she left ’em in the hall. I don’t think you seem to quiet your poor father very much just now.”

  “All right.” And Bibbs bore Sibyl’s wraps across the street and delivered them to Roscoe, who met him at the door. Bibbs said only, “Forgot these,” and, “Good night, Roscoe,” cordially and cheerfully, and returned to the New House. His mother and father were still talking in the library, but with discretion he passed rapidly on and upward to his own room, and there he proceeded to write in his note-book.

  CHAPTER XXII

  There seems to be another curious thing about Love [Bibbs wrote].

  Love is blind while it lives and only opens its eyes and becomes

  very wide awake when it dies. Let it alone until then.

  You cannot reason with love or with any other passion. The wise

  will not wish for love — nor for ambition. These are passions

  and bring others in their train — hatreds and jealousies — all

  blind. Friendship and a quiet heart for the wise.

  What a turbulence is love! It is dangerous for a blind thing to

  be turbulent; there are precipices in life. One would not cross

  a mountain-pass with a thick cloth over his eyes. Lovers do.

  Friendship walks gently and with open eyes.

  To walk to church with a friend! To sit beside her there! To rise

  when she rises, and to touch with one’s thumb and fingers the other

  half of the hymn-book that she holds! What lover, with his fierce

  ways, could know this transcendent happiness?

  Friendship brings everything that heaven could bring. There is no

  labor that cannot become a living rapture if you know that a friend

  is thinking of you as you labor. So you sing at your work. For

  the work is part of the thoughts of your friend; so you love it!

  Love is demanding and claiming and insistent. Friendship is all

  kindness — it makes the world glorious with kindness. What color

  you see when you walk with a friend! You see that the gray sky

  is brilliant and shimmering; you see that the smoke has warm

  browns and is marvelously sculptured — the air becomes iridescent.

  You see the gold in brown hair. Light floods everything.

  When you walk to church with a friend you know that life can give

  you nothing richer. You pray that there will be no change in

  anything for ever.

  What an adorable thing it is to discover a little foible in your

  friend, a bit of vanity that gives you one thing more about her to

  adore! On a cold morning she will perhaps walk to church with you

  without her furs, and she will blush and return an evasive answer

  when you ask her why she does not wear them. You will say no

  more, because you understand. She looks beautiful in her furs;

  you love their darkness against her cheek; but you comprehend that

  they conceal the loveliness of her throat and the fine line of her

  chin, and that she also has comprehended this, and, wishing to

  look still more bewitching, discards her furs at the risk of

  taking cold. So you hold your peace, and try to look as if you

  had not thought it out.

  This theory is satisfactory except that it does not account for

  the absence of the muff. Ah, well, there must always be a mystery

  somewhere! Mystery is a part of enchantment.

  Manual labor is best. Your heart can sing and your mind can dream

  while your hands are working. You could not have a singing heart

  and a dreaming mind all day if you had to scheme out dollars,

  or if you had to add columns of figures. Those things take your

  attention. You cannot be thinking of your friend while you write

  letters beginning “Yours of the 17th inst. rec’d and contents

  duly noted.” But to work with your hands all day, thinking and

  singing, and then, after nightfall, to hear the ineffable kindness

  of your friend’s greeting — always there — for you! Who would wake

  from such a dream as this?

  Dawn and the sea — music in moonlit gardens — nightingales

  serenading through almond-groves in bloom — what could bring such

  things into the city’s turmoil? Yet they are here, and roses

  blossom in the soot. That is what it means not to be alone!

  That is what a friend gives you!

  Having thus demonstrated that he was about twenty-five and had formed a somewhat indefinite definition of friendship, but one entirely his own (and perhaps Mary’s) Bibbs went to bed, and was the only Sheridan to sleep soundly through the night and to wake at dawn with a light heart.

  His cheerfulness was vaguely diminished by the troublous state of affairs of his family. He had recognized his condition when he wrote, “Who would wake from such a dream as this?” Bibbs was a sympathetic person, easily touched, but he was indeed living in a dream, and all things outside of it were veiled and
remote — for that is the way of youth in a dream. And Bibbs, who had never before been of any age, either old or young, had come to his youth at last.

  He went whistling from the house before even his father had come down-stairs. There was a fog outdoors, saturated with a fine powder of soot, and though Bibbs noticed absently the dim shape of an automobile at the curb before Roscoe’s house, he did not recognize it as Dr. Gurney’s, but went cheerily on his way through the dingy mist. And when he was once more installed beside his faithful zinc-eater he whistled and sang to it, as other workmen did to their own machines sometimes, when things went well. His comrades in the shop glanced at him amusedly now and then. They liked him, and he ate his lunch at noon with a group of Socialists who approved of his ideas and talked of electing him to their association.

  The short days of the year had come, and it was dark before the whistles blew. When the signal came, Bibbs went to the office, where he divested himself of his overalls — his single divergence from the routine of his fellow-workmen — and after that he used soap and water copiously. This was his transformation scene: he passed into the office a rather frail young working-man noticeably begrimed, and passed out of it to the pavement a cheerfully pre-occupied sample of gentry, fastidious to the point of elegance.

  The sidewalk was crowded with the bearers of dinner-pails, men and boys and women and girls from the work-rooms that closed at five. Many hurried and some loitered; they went both east and west, jostling one another, and Bibbs, turning his face homeward, was forced to go slowly.

  Coming toward him, as slowly, through the crowd, a tall girl caught sight of his long, thin figure and stood still until he had almost passed her, for in the thick crowd and the thicker gloom he did not recognize her, though his shoulder actually touched hers. He would have gone by, but she laughed delightedly; and he stopped short, startled. Two boys, one chasing the other, swept between them, and Bibbs stood still, peering about him in deep perplexity. She leaned toward him.

  “I knew YOU!” she said.

  “Good heavens!” cried Bibbs. “I thought it was your voice coming out of a star!”

  “There’s only smoke overhead,” said Mary, and laughed again. “There aren’t any stars.”

  “Oh yes, there were — when you laughed!”

  She took his arm, and they went on. “I’ve come to walk home with you, Bibbs. I wanted to.”

  “But were you here in the—”

  “In the dark? Yes! Waiting? Yes!”

  Bibbs was radiant; he felt suffocated with happiness. He began to scold her.

  “But it’s not safe, and I’m not worth it. You shouldn’t have — you ought to know better. What did—”

  “I only waited about twelve seconds,” she laughed. “I’d just got here.”

  “But to come all this way and to this part of town in the dark, you—”

  “I was in this part of town already,” she said. “At least, I was only seven or eight blocks away, and it was dark when I came out, and I’d have had to go home alone — and I preferred going home with you.”

  “It’s pretty beautiful for me,” said Bibbs, with a deep breath. “You’ll never know what it was to hear your laugh in the darkness — and then to — to see you standing there! Oh, it was like — it was like — how can I TELL you what it was like?” They had passed beyond the crowd now, and a crossing-lamp shone upon them, which revealed the fact that again she was without her furs. Here was a puzzle. Why did that adorable little vanity of hers bring her out without them in the DARK? But of course she had gone out long before dark. For undefinable reasons this explanation was not quite satisfactory; however, allowing it to stand, his solicitude for her took another turn. “I think you ought to have a car,” he said, “especially when you want to be out after dark. You need one in winter, anyhow. Have you ever asked your father for one?”

  “No,” said Mary. “I don’t think I’d care for one particularly.”

  “I wish you would.” Bibbs’s tone was earnest and troubled. “I think in winter you—”

  “No, no,” she interrupted, lightly. “I don’t need—”

  “But my mother tried to insist on sending one over here every afternoon for me. I wouldn’t let her, because I like the walk, but a girl—”

  “A girl likes to walk, too,” said Mary. “Let me tell you where I’ve been this afternoon and how I happened to be near enough to make you take me home. I’ve been to see a little old man who makes pictures of the smoke. He has a sort of warehouse for a studio, and he lives there with his mother and his wife and their seven children, and he’s gloriously happy. I’d seen one of his pictures at an exhibition, and I wanted to see more of them, so he showed them to me. He has almost everthing he ever painted; I don’t suppose he’s sold more than four or five pictures in his life. He gives drawing-lessons to keep alive.”

  “How do you mean he paints the smoke?” Bibbs asked.

  “Literally. He paints from his studio window and from the street — anywhere. He just paints what’s around him — and it’s beautiful.”

  “The smoke?”

  “Wonderful! He sees the sky through it, somehow. He does the ugly roofs of cheap houses through a haze of smoke, and he does smoky sunsets and smoky sunrises, and he has other things with the heavy, solid, slow columns of smoke going far out and growing more ethereal and mixing with the hazy light in the distance; and he has others with the broken sky-line of down-town, all misted with the smoke and puffs and jets of vapor that have colors like an orchard in mid-April. I’m going to take you there some Sunday afternoon, Bibbs.”

  “You’re showing me the town,” he said. “I didn’t know what was in it at all.”

  “There are workers in beauty here,” she told him, gently. “There are other painters more prosperous than my friend. There are all sorts of things.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “No. Since the town began growing so great that it called itself ‘greater,’ one could live here all one’s life and know only the side of it that shows.”

  “The beauty-workers seem buried very deep,” said Bibbs. “And I imagine that your friend who makes the smoke beautiful must be buried deepest of all. My father loves the smoke, but I can’t imagine his buying one of your friend’s pictures. He’d buy the ‘Bay of Naples,’ but he wouldn’t get one of those. He’d think smoke in a picture was horrible — unless he could use it for an advertisement.”

  “Yes,” she said, thoughtfully. “And really he’s the town. They ARE buried pretty deep, it seems, sometimes, Bibbs.”

  “And yet it’s all wonderful,” he said. “It’s wonderful to me.”

  “You mean the town is wonderful to you?”

  “Yes, because everything is, since you called me your friend. The city is only a rumble on the horizon for me. It can’t come any closer than the horizon so long as you let me see you standing by my old zinc-eater all day long, helping me. Mary—” He stopped with a gasp. “That’s the first time I’ve called you ‘Mary’!”

  “Yes.” She laughed, a little tremuously. “Though I wanted you to!”

  “I said it without thinking. It must be because you came there to walk home with me. That must be it.”

  “Women like to have things said,” Mary informed him, her tremulous laughter continuing. “Were you glad I came for you?”

  “No — not ‘glad.’ I felt as if I were being carried straight up and up and up — over the clouds. I feel like that still. I think I’m that way most of the time. I wonder what I was like before I knew you. The person I was then seems to have been somebody else, not Bibbs Sheridan at all. It seems long, long ago. I was gloomy and sickly — somebody else — somebody I don’t understand now, a coward afraid of shadows — afraid of things that didn’t exist — afraid of my old zinc-eater! And now I’m only afraid of what might change anything.”

  She was silent a moment, and then, “You’re happy, Bibbs?” she asked.

  “Ah, don’t you see?” he cried.
“I want it to last for a thousand, thousand years, just as it is! You’ve made me so rich, I’m a miser. I wouldn’t have one thing different — nothing, nothing!”

  “Dear Bibbs!” she said, and laughed happily.

  CHAPTER XXIII

  BIBBS CONTINUED TO live in the shelter of his dream. He had told Edith, after his ineffective effort to be useful in her affairs, that he had decided that he was “a member of the family”; but he appeared to have relapsed to the retired list after that one attempt at participancy — he was far enough detached from membership now. These were turbulent days in the New House, but Bibbs had no part whatever in the turbulence — he seemed an absent-minded stranger, present by accident and not wholly aware that he was present. He would sit, faintly smiling over pleasant imaginings and dear reminiscences of his own, while battle raged between Edith and her father, or while Sheridan unloosed jeremiads upon the sullen Roscoe, who drank heavily to endure them. The happy dreamer wandered into storm-areas like a somnambulist, and wandered out again unawakened. He was sorry for his father and for Roscoe, and for Edith and for Sibyl, but their sufferings and outcries seemed far away.

  Sibyl was under Gurney’s care. Roscoe had sent for him on Sunday night, not long after Bibbs returned the abandoned wraps; and during the first days of Sibyl’s illness the doctor found it necessary to be with her frequently, and to install a muscular nurse. And whether he would or no, Gurney received from his hysterical patient a variety of pungent information which would have staggered anybody but a family physician. Among other things he was given to comprehend the change in Bibbs, and why the zinc-eater was not putting a lump in the operator’s gizzard as of yore.

  Sibyl was not delirious — she was a thin little ego writhing and shrieking in pain. Life had hurt her, and had driven her into hurting herself; her condition was only the adult’s terrible exaggeration of that of a child after a bad bruise — there must be screaming and telling mother all about the hurt and how it happened. Sibyl babbled herself hoarse when Gurney withheld morphine. She went from the beginning to the end in a breath. No protest stopped her; nothing stopped her.