Beginning at the beginning and learning from the ground up was a long
course for Bibbs at the sanitarium, with milk and “zwieback” as the
basis of instruction; and the months were many and tiresome before he
was considered near enough graduation to go for a walk leaning on a
nurse and a cane. These and subsequent months saw the planning, the
building, and the completion of the New House; and it was to that abode
of Bigness that Bibbs was brought when the cane, without the nurse, was
found sufficient to his support.
Edith met him at the station. “Well, well, Bibbs!” she said, as he came
slowly through the gates, the last of all the travelers from that train.
She gave his hand a brisk little shake, averting her eyes after a quick
glance at him, and turning at once toward the passage to the street. “Do
you think they ought to've let you come? You certainly don't look well!”
“But I certainly do look better,” he returned, in a voice as slow as
his gait; a drawl that was a necessity, for when Bibbs tried to speak
quickly he stammered. “Up to about a month ago it took two people to see
me. They had to get me in a line between 'em!”
Edith did not turn her eyes directly toward him again, after her first
quick glance; and her expression, in spite of her, showed a faint,
troubled distaste, the look of a healthy person pressed by some
obligation of business to visit a “bad” ward in a hospital. She was
nineteen, fair and slim, with small, unequal features, but a prettiness
of color and a brilliancy of eyes that created a total impression close
upon beauty. Her movements were eager and restless: there was something
about her, as kind old ladies say, that was very sweet; and there was
something that was hurried and breathless. This was new to Bibbs; it was
a perceptible change since he had last seen her, and he bent upon her
a steady, whimsical scrutiny as they stood at the curb, waiting for an
automobile across the street to disengage itself from the traffic.
“That's the new car,” she said. “Everything's new. We've got four now,
besides Jim's. Roscoe's got two.”
“Edith, you look--” he began, and paused.
“Oh, WE're all well,” she said, briskly; and then, as if something in
his tone had caught her as significant, “Well, HOW do I look, Bibbs?”
“You look--” He paused again, taking in the full length of her--her trim
brown shoes, her scant, tapering, rough skirt, and her coat of brown
and green, her long green tippet and her mad little rough hat in the mad
mode--all suited to the October day.
“How do I look?” she insisted.
“You look,” he answered, as his examination ended upon an incrusted
watch of platinum and enamel at her wrist, “you look--expensive!” That
was a substitute for what he intended to say, for her constraint and
preoccupation, manifested particularly in her keeping her direct
glance away from him, did not seem to grant the privilege of impulsive
intimacies.
“I expect I am!” she laughed, and sidelong caught the direction of his
glance. “Of course I oughtn't to wear it in the daytime--it's an evening
thing, for the theater--but my day wrist-watch is out of gear. Bobby
Lamhorn broke it yesterday; he's a regular rowdy sometimes. Do you want
Claus to help you in?”
“Oh no,” said Bibbs. “I'm alive.” And after a fit of panting subsequent
to his climbing into the car unaided, he added, “Of course, I have to
TELL people!”
“We only got your telegram this morning,” she said, as they began to
move rapidly through the “wholesale district” neighboring the station.
“Mother said she'd hardly expected you this month.”
“They seemed to be through with me up there in the country,” he
explained, gently. “At least they said they were, and they wouldn't keep
me any longer, because so many really sick people wanted to get in. They
told me to go home--and I didn't have any place else to go. It'll be all
right, Edith; I'll sit in the woodshed until after dark every day.”
“Pshaw!” She laughed nervously. “Of course we're all of us glad to have
you back.”
“Yes?” he said. “Father?”
“Of course! Didn't he write and tell you to come home?” She did not turn
to him with the question. All the while she rode with her face directly
forward.
“No,” he said; “father hasn't written.”
She flushed a little. “I expect I ought to've written sometime, or one
of the boys--”
“Oh no; that was all right.”
“You can't think how busy we've all been this year, Bibbs. I often
planned to write--and then, just as I was going to, something would turn
up. And I'm sure it's been just the same way with Jim and Roscoe. Of
course we knew mamma was writing often and--”
“Of course!” he said, readily. “There's a chunk of coal fallen on your
glove, Edith. Better flick it off before it smears. My word! I'd almost
forgotten how sooty it is here.”
“We've been having very bright weather this month--for us.” She blew the
flake of soot into the air, seeming relieved.
He looked up at the dingy sky, wherein hung the disconsolate sun like
a cold tin pan nailed up in a smoke-house by some lunatic, for a
decoration. “Yes,” said Bibbs. “It's very gay.” A few moments later, as
they passed a corner, “Aren't we going home?” he asked.
“Why, yes! Did you want to go somewhere else first?”
“No. Your new driver's taking us out of the way, isn't he?”
“No. This is right. We're going straight home.”
“But we've passed the corner. We always turned--”
“Good gracious!” she cried. “Didn't you know we'd moved? Didn't you know
we were in the New House?”
“Why, no!” said Bibbs. “Are you?”
“We've been there a month! Good gracious! Didn't you know--” She broke
off, flushing again, and then went on hastily: “Of course, mamma's never
been so busy in her life; we ALL haven't had time to do anything but
keep on the hop. Mamma couldn't even come to the station to-day. Papa's
got some of his business friends and people from around the
OLD-house neighborhood coming to-night for a big dinner and
'house-warming'--dreadful kind of people--but mamma's got it all on her
hands. She's never sat down a MINUTE; and if she did, papa would have
her up again before--”
“Of course,” said Bibbs. “Do you like the new place, Edith?”
“I don't like some of the things father WOULD have in it, but it's the
finest house in town, and that ought to be good enough for me! Papa
bought one thing I like--a view of the Bay of Naples in oil that's
perfectly beautiful; it's the first thing you see as you come in the
front hall, and it's eleven feet long. But he would have that old
fruit picture we had in the Murphy Street house hung up in the new
dining-room. You remember it--a table and a watermelon sliced open,
and a lot of rouged-looking apples and some shiny lemons, with two dead
prairie-chickens on a chair? He bought it at a furniture-store years and
years ago, and he claims it's a finer picture than any they saw in the
museums, that time he took mamma to Europe. But it's horribly out of
date to have those things in dining-rooms, and I caught Bobby Lamhorn
giggling at it; and Sibyl made fun of it, too, with Bobby, and then told
papa she agreed with him about its being such a fine thing, and said he
did just right to insist on having it where he wanted it. She makes me
tired! Sibyl!”
Edith's first constraint with her brother, amounting almost to
awkwardness, vanished with this theme, though she still kept her full
gaze always to the front, even in the extreme ardor of her denunciation
of her sister-in-law.
“SIBYL!” she repeated, with such heat and vigor that the name seemed
to strike fire on her lips. “I'd like to know why Roscoe couldn't have
married somebody from HERE that would have done us some good! He could
have got in with Bobby Lamhorn years ago just as well as now, and
Bobby'd have introduced him to the nicest girls in town, but instead of
that he had to go and pick up this Sibyl Rink! I met some awfully
nice people from her town when mamma and I were at Atlantic City, last
spring, and not one had ever heard of the Rinks! Not even HEARD of 'em!”
“I thought you were great friends with Sibyl,” Bibbs said.
“Up to the time I found her out!” the sister returned, with continuing
vehemence. “I've found out some things about Mrs. Roscoe Sheridan
lately--”
“It's only lately?”
“Well--” Edith hesitated, her lips setting primly. “Of course, I
always did see that she never cared the snap of her little finger about
ROSCOE!”
“It seems,” said Bibbs, in laconic protest, “that she married him.”
The sister emitted a shrill cry, to be interpreted as contemptuous
laughter, and, in her emotion, spoke too impulsively: “Why, she'd have
married YOU!”
“No, no,” he said; “she couldn't be that bad!”
“I didn't mean--” she began, distressed. “I only meant--I didn't mean--”
“Never mind, Edith,” he consoled her. “You see, she couldn't have
married me, because I didn't know her; and besides, if she's as
mercenary as all that she'd have been too clever. The head doctor even
had to lend me the money for my ticket home.”
“I didn't mean anything unpleasant about YOU,” Edith babbled. “I only
meant I thought she was the kind of girl who was so simply crazy to
marry somebody she'd have married anybody that asked her.”
“Yes, yes,” said Bibbs, “it's all straight.” And, perceiving that
his sister's expression was that of a person whose adroitness has set
matters perfectly to rights, he chuckled silently.
“Roscoe's perfectly lovely to her,” she continued, a moment later. “Too
lovely! If he'd wake up a little and lay down the law, some day, like a
MAN, I guess she'd respect him more and learn to behave herself!”
“'Behave'?”
“Oh, well, I mean she's so insincere,” said Edith, characteristically
evasive when it came to stating the very point to which she had led, and
in this not unique of her sex.
Bibbs contented himself with a non-committal gesture. “Business
is crawling up the old streets,” he said, his long, tremulous hand
indicating a vasty structure in course of erection. “The boarding-houses
come first and then the--”
“That isn't for shops,” she informed him. “That's a new investment of
papa's--the 'Sheridan Apartments.'”
“Well, well,” he murmured. “I supposed 'Sheridan' was almost well enough
known here already.”
“Oh, we're well enough known ABOUT!” she said, impatiently. “I guess
there isn't a man, woman, child, or nigger baby in town that doesn't
know who we are. But we aren't in with the right people.”
“No!” he exclaimed. “Who's all that?”
“Who's all what?”
“The 'right people.'”
“You know what I mean: the best people, the old families--the people
that have the real social position in this town and that know they've
got it.”
Bibbs indulged in his silent chuckle again; he seemed greatly amused. “I
thought that the people who actually had the real what-you-may-call-it
didn't know it,” he said. “I've always understood that it was very
unsatisfactory, because if you thought about it you didn't have it, and
if you had it you didn't know it.”
“That's just bosh,” she retorted. “They know it in this town, all right!
I found out a lot of things, long before we began to think of building
out in this direction. The right people in this town aren't always the
society-column ones, and they mix around with outsiders, and they don't
all belong to any one club--they're taken in all sorts into all their
clubs--but they're a clan, just the same; and they have the clan feeling
and they're just as much We, Us and Company as any crowd you read about
anywhere in the world. Most of 'em were here long before papa came, and
the grandfathers of the girls of my age knew each other, and--”
“I see,” Bibbs interrupted, gravely. “Their ancestors fled together
from many a stricken field, and Crusaders' blood flows in their veins. I
always understood the first house was built by an old party of the name
of Vertrees who couldn't get along with Dan'l Boone, and hurried away to
these parts because Dan'l wanted him to give back a gun he'd lent him.”
Edith gave a little ejaculation of alarm. “You mustn't repeat that
story, Bibbs, even if it's true. The Vertreeses are THE best family, and
of course the very oldest here; they were an old family even before
Mary Vertrees's great-great-grandfather came west and founded this
settlement. He came from Lynn, Massachusetts, and they have relatives
there YET--some of the best people in Lynn!”
“No!” exclaimed Bibbs, incredulously.
“And there are other old families like the Vertreeses,” she went on,
not heeding him; “the Lamhorns and the Kittersbys and the J. Palmerston
Smiths--”
“Strange names to me,” he interrupted. “Poor things! None of them have
my acquaintance.”
“No, that's just it!” she cried. “And papa had never even heard the name
of Vertrees! Mrs. Vertrees went with some anti-smoke committee to see
him, and he told her that smoke was what made her husband bring home his
wages from the pay-roll on Saturday night! HE told us about it, and I
thought I just couldn't live through the night, I was so ashamed! Mr.
Vertrees has always lived on his income, and papa didn't know him, of
course. They're the stiffist, most elegant people in the whole town. And
to crown it all, papa went and bought the next lot to the old Vertrees
country mansion--it's in the very heart of the best new residence
district now, and that's where the New House is, right next door to
them--and I must say it makes their place look rather shabby! I met Mary
Vertrees when I joined the Mission Service Helpers, but she never did
any more than just barely bow to me, and since papa's break I doubt if
she'll do that! They haven't called.”
“And you think if I spread this gossip about Vertrees the First stealing
Dan'l Boone's gun, the chances that they WILL call--”
“Papa knows what a break he made with Mrs. Vertrees. I made him
understand that,” said Edith, demurely, “and he's promised to try and
meet Mr. Vertrees and be nice to him. It's just this way: if we don't
know THEM, it's practically no use in our having built the New House;
and if we DO know them and they're decent to us, we're right with the
right people. They can do the whole thing for us. Bobby Lamhorn told
Sibyl he was going to bring his mother to call on her and on mamma, but
it was weeks ago, and I notice he hasn't done it; and if Mrs. Vertrees
decides not to know us, I'm darn sure Mrs Lamhorn'll never come. That's
ONE thing Sibyl didn't manage! She SAID Bobby offered to bring his
mother--”
“You say he is a friend of Roscoe's?” Bibbs asked.
“Oh, he's a friend of the whole family,” she returned, with a petulance
which she made an effort to disguise. “Roscoe and he got acquainted
somewhere, and they take him to the theater about every other night.
Sibyl has him to lunch, too, and keeps--” She broke off with an angry
little jerk of the head. “We can see the New House from the second
corner ahead. Roscoe has built straight across the street from us, you
know. Honestly, Sibyl makes me think of a snake, sometimes--the way
she pulls the wool over people's eyes! She honeys up to papa and gets
anything in the world she wants out of him, and then makes fun of him
behind his back--yes, and to his face, but HE can't see it! She got
him to give her a twelve-thousand-dollar porch for their house after it
was--”
“Good heavens!” said Bibbs, staring ahead as they reached the corner and
the car swung to the right, following a bend in the street. “Is that the
New House?”
“Yes. What do you think of it?”
“Well,” he drawled, “I'm pretty sure the sanitarium's about half a size
bigger; I can't be certain till I measure.”
And a moment later, as they entered the driveway, he added, seriously:
“But it's beautiful!”