The Sheridan Building was the biggest skyscraper; the Sheridan Trust
Company was the biggest of its kind, and Sheridan himself had been the
biggest builder and breaker and truster and buster under the smoke. He
had come from a country cross-roads, at the beginning of the growth, and
he had gone up and down in the booms and relapses of that period; but
each time he went down he rebounded a little higher, until finally,
after a year of overwork and anxiety--the latter not decreased by a
chance, remote but possible, of recuperation from the former in the
penitentiary--he found himself on top, with solid substance under
his feet; and thereafter “played it safe.” But his hunger to get was
unabated, for it was in the very bones of him and grew fiercer.
He was the city incarnate. He loved it, calling it God's country, as he
called the smoke Prosperity, breathing the dingy cloud with relish. And
when soot fell upon his cuff he chuckled; he could have kissed it. “It's
good! It's good!” he said, and smacked his lips in gusto. “Good, clean
soot; it's our life-blood, God bless it!” The smoke was one of his
great enthusiasms; he laughed at a committee of plaintive housewives who
called to beg his aid against it. “Smoke's what brings your husbands'
money home on Saturday night,” he told them, jovially. “Smoke may hurt
your little shrubberies in the front yard some, but it's the catarrhal
climate and the adenoids that starts your chuldern coughing. Smoke makes
the climate better. Smoke means good health: it makes the people wash
more. They have to wash so much they wash off the microbes. You go
home and ask your husbands what smoke puts in their pockets out o' the
pay-roll--and you'll come around next time to get me to turn out more
smoke instead o' chokin' it off!”
It was Narcissism in him to love the city so well; he saw his reflection
in it; and, like it, he was grimy, big, careless, rich, strong, and
unquenchably optimistic. From the deepest of his inside all the way out
he believed it was the finest city in the world. “Finest” was his word.
He thought of it as his city as he thought of his family as his family;
and just as profoundly believed his city to be the finest city in
the world, so did he believe his family to be--in spite of his son
Bibbs--the finest family in the world. As a matter of fact, he knew
nothing worth knowing about either.
Bibbs Sheridan was a musing sort of boy, poor in health, and considered
the failure--the “odd one”--of the family. Born during that most
dangerous and anxious of the early years, when the mother fretted and
the father took his chance, he was an ill-nourished baby, and
grew meagerly, only lengthwise, through a feeble childhood. At his
christening he was committed for life to “Bibbs” mainly through lack of
imagination on his mother's part, for though it was her maiden name, she
had no strong affection for it; but it was “her turn” to name the baby,
and, as she explained later, she “couldn't think of anything else she
liked AT ALL!” She offered this explanation one day when the sickly boy
was nine and after a long fit of brooding had demanded some reason for
his name's being Bibbs. He requested then with unwonted vehemence to
be allowed to exchange names with his older brother, Roscoe Conkling
Sheridan, or with the oldest, James Sheridan, Junior, and upon being
refused went down into the cellar and remained there the rest of
that day. And the cook, descending toward dusk, reported that he had
vanished; but a search revealed that he was in the coal-pile, completely
covered and still burrowing. Removed by force and carried upstairs,
he maintained a cryptic demeanor, refusing to utter a syllable of
explanation, even under the lash. This obvious thing was wholly a
mystery to both parents; the mother was nonplussed, failed to trace and
connect; and the father regarded his son as a stubborn and mysterious
fool, an impression not effaced as the years went by.
At twenty-two, Bibbs was physically no more than the outer scaffolding
of a man, waiting for the building to begin inside--a long-shanked,
long-faced, rickety youth, sallow and hollow and haggard, dark-haired
and dark-eyed, with a peculiar expression of countenance; indeed, at
first sight of Bibbs Sheridan a stranger might well be solicitous, for
he seemed upon the point of tears. But to a slightly longer gaze, not
grief, but mirth, was revealed as his emotion; while a more searching
scrutiny was proportionately more puzzling--he seemed about to burst out
crying or to burst out laughing, one or the other, inevitably, but it
was impossible to decide which. And Bibbs never, on any occasion of his
life, either laughed aloud or wept.
He was a “disappointment” to his father. At least that was the parent's
word--a confirmed and established word after his first attempt to make
a “business man” of the boy. He sent Bibbs to “begin at the bottom and
learn from the ground up” in the machine-shop of the Sheridan Automatic
Pump Works, and at the end of six months the family physician sent Bibbs
to begin at the bottom and learn from the ground up in a sanitarium.
“You needn't worry, mamma,” Sheridan told his wife. “There's nothin' the
matter with Bibbs except he hates work so much it makes him sick. I put
him in the machine-shop, and I guess I know what I'm doin' about as well
as the next man. Ole Doc Gurney always was one o' them nutty alarmists.
Does he think I'd do anything 'd be bad for my own flesh and blood? He
makes me tired!”
Anything except perfectly definite health or perfectly definite disease
was incomprehensible to Sheridan. He had a genuine conviction that lack
of physical persistence in any task involving money must be due to some
subtle weakness of character itself, to some profound shiftlessness or
slyness. He understood typhoid fever, pneumonia, and appendicitis--one
had them, and either died or got over them and went back to work--but
when the word “nervous” appeared in a diagnosis he became honestly
suspicious: he had the feeling that there was something contemptible
about it, that there was a nigger in the wood-pile somewhere.
“Look at me,” he said. “Look at what I did at his age! Why, when I was
twenty years old, wasn't I up every morning at four o'clock choppin'
wood--yes! and out in the dark and the snow--to build a fire in a
country grocery store? And here Bibbs has to go and have a DOCTOR
because he can't--Pho! it makes me tired! If he'd gone at it like a man
he wouldn't be sick.”
He paced the bedroom--the usual setting for such parental
discussions--in his nightgown, shaking his big, grizzled head and
gesticulating to his bedded spouse. “My Lord!” he said. “If a little,
teeny bit o' work like this is too much for him, why, he ain't fit for
anything! It's nine-tenths imagination, and the rest of it--well, I
won't say it's deliberate, but I WOULD like to know just how much of
it's put on!”
“Bibbs didn't want the doctor,” said Mrs. Sheridan. “It was when he was
here to dinner that night, and noticed how he couldn't eat anything.
Honey, you better come to bed.”
“Eat!” he snorted. “Eat! It's work that makes men eat! And it's
imagination that keeps people from eatin'. Busy men don't get time for
that kind of imagination; and there's another thing you'll notice
about good health, if you'll take the trouble to look around you Mrs.
Sheridan: busy men haven't got time to be sick and they don't GET sick.
You just think it over and you'll find that ninety-nine per cent. of the
sick people you know are either women or loafers. Yes, ma'am!”
“Honey,” she said again, drowsily, “you better come to bed.”
“Look at the other boys,” her husband bade her. “Look at Jim and Roscoe.
Look at how THEY work! There isn't a shiftless bone in their bodies.
Work never made Jim or Roscoe sick. Jim takes half the load off my
shoulders already. Right now there isn't a harder-workin', brighter
business man in this city than Jim. I've pushed him, but he give me
something to push AGAINST. You can't push 'nervous dyspepsia'! And look
at Roscoe; just LOOK at what that boy's done for himself, and barely
twenty-seven years old--married, got a fine wife, and ready to build
for himself with his own money, when I put up the New House for you and
Edie.”
“Papa, you'll catch cold in your bare feet,” she murmured. “You better
come to bed.”
“And I'm just as proud of Edie, for a girl,” he continued, emphatically,
“as I am of Jim and Roscoe for boys. She'll make some man a mighty good
wife when the time comes. She's the prettiest and talentedest girl in
the United States! Look at that poem she wrote when she was in school
and took the prize with; it's the best poem I ever read in my life, and
she'd never even tried to write one before. It's the finest thing I
ever read, and R. T. Bloss said so, too; and I guess he's a good enough
literary judge for me--turns out more advertisin' liter'cher than any
man in the city. I tell you she's smart! Look at the way she worked me
to get me to promise the New House--and I guess you had your finger
in that, too, mamma! This old shack's good enough for me, but you and
little Edie 'll have to have your way. I'll get behind her and push her
the same as I will Jim and Roscoe. I tell you I'm mighty proud o' them
three chuldern! But Bibbs--” He paused, shaking his head. “Honest,
mamma, when I talk to men that got ALL their boys doin' well and worth
their salt, why, I have to keep my mind on Jim and Roscoe and forget
about Bibbs.”
Mrs. Sheridan tossed her head fretfully upon the pillow. “You did the
best you could, papa,” she said, impatiently, “so come to bed and quit
reproachin' yourself for it.”
He glared at her indignantly. “Reproachin' myself!” he snorted. “I ain't
doin' anything of the kind! What in the name o' goodness would I want
to reproach myself for? And it wasn't the 'best I could,' either. It was
the best ANYBODY could! I was givin' him a chance to show what was
in him and make a man of himself--and here he goes and gets 'nervous
dyspepsia' on me!”
He went to the old-fashioned gas-fixture, turned out the light, and
muttered his way morosely into bed.
“What?” said his wife, crossly, bothered by a subsequent mumbling.
“More like hook-worm, I said,” he explained, speaking louder. “I don't
know what to do with him!”