The Turmoil Part 30

"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.

n.o.body 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 n.i.g.g.e.r George? Maybe HE'S got some plan how I better manage my family.

Bibbs, for G.o.d'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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sion. The wise will not wish for love--nor for ambition. These are pa.s.sions 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-pa.s.s 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 m.u.f.f. 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 a.s.sociation.

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 pa.s.sed into the office a rather frail young working-man noticeably begrimed, and pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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."