Through the open country Bibbs was borne flying between brown fields
and sun-flecked groves of gray trees, to breathe the rushing, clean
air beneath a glorious sky--that sky so despised in the city, and so
maltreated there, that from early October to mid-May it was impossible
for men to remember that blue is the rightful color overhead.
Upon each of Bibbs's cheeks there was a hint of something almost
resembling a pinkishness; not actual color, but undeniably its phantom.
How largely this apparition may have been the work of the wind upon his
face it is difficult to calculate, for beyond a doubt it was partly the
result of a lady's bowing to him upon no more formal introduction than
the circumstance of his having caught her looking into his window a
month before. She had bowed definitely; she had bowed charmingly. And it
seemed to Bibbs that she must have meant to convey her forgiveness.
There had been something in her recognition of him unfamiliar to
his experience, and he rode the warmer for it. Nor did he lack the
impression that he would long remember her as he had just seen her: her
veil tumultuously blowing back, her face glowing in the wind--and that
look of gay friendliness tossed to him like a fresh rose in carnival.
By and by, upon a rising ground, the driver halted the car, then backed
and tacked, and sent it forward again with its nose to the south and the
smoke. Far before him Bibbs saw the great smudge upon the horizon,
that nest of cloud in which the city strove and panted like an engine
shrouded in its own steam. But to Bibbs, who had now to go to the very
heart of it, for a commanded interview with his father, the distant
cloud was like an implacable genius issuing thunderously in smoke from
his enchanted bottle, and irresistibly drawing Bibbs nearer and nearer.
They passed from the farm lands, and came, in the amber light of
November late afternoon, to the farthermost outskirts of the city; and
here the sky shimmered upon the verge of change from blue to gray;
the smoke did not visibly permeate the air, but it was there,
nevertheless--impalpable, thin, no more than the dust of smoke. And
then, as the car drove on, the chimneys and stacks of factories came
swimming up into view like miles of steamers advancing abreast, every
funnel with its vast plume, savage and black, sweeping to the horizon,
dripping wealth and dirt and suffocation over league on league already
rich and vile with grime.
The sky had become only a dingy thickening of the soiled air; and a roar
and clangor of metals beat deafeningly on Bibbs's ears. And now the car
passed two great blocks of long brick buildings, hideous in all ways
possible to make them hideous; doorways showing dark one moment and
lurid the next with the leap of some virulent interior flame, revealing
blackened giants, half naked, in passionate action, struggling with
formless things in the hot illumination. And big as these shops were,
they were growing bigger, spreading over a third block, where two new
structures were mushrooming to completion in some hasty cement process
of a stability not over-reassuring. Bibbs pulled the rug closer about
him, and not even the phantom of color was left upon his cheeks as he
passed this place, for he knew it too well. Across the face of one of
the buildings there was an enormous sign: “Sheridan Automatic Pump Co.,
Inc.”
Thence they went through streets of wooden houses, all grimed, and
adding their own grime from many a sooty chimney; flimsey wooden houses
of a thousand flimsy whimsies in the fashioning, built on narrow lots
and nudging one another crossly, shutting out the stingy sunlight from
one another; bad neighbors who would destroy one another root and branch
some night when the right wind blew. They were only waiting for that
wind and a cigarette, and then they would all be gone together--a pinch
of incense burned upon the tripod of the god.
Along these streets there were skinny shade-trees, and here and there
a forest elm or walnut had been left; but these were dying. Some people
said it was the scale; some said it was the smoke; and some were sure
that asphalt and “improving” the streets did it; but Bigness was in
too Big a hurry to bother much about trees. He had telegraph-poles
and telephone-poles and electric-light-poles and trolley-poles by the
thousand to take their places. So he let the trees die and put up his
poles. They were hideous, but nobody minded that; and sometimes the
wires fell and killed people--but not often enough to matter at all.
Thence onward the car bore Bibbs through the older parts of the
town where the few solid old houses not already demolished were in
transition: some, with their fronts torn away, were being made into
segments of apartment-buildings; others had gone uproariously into
trade, brazenly putting forth “show-windows” on their first floors,
seeming to mean it for a joke; one or two with unaltered facades peeped
humorously over the tops of temporary office buildings of one story
erected in the old front yards. Altogether, the town here was like a
boarding-house hash the Sunday after Thanksgiving; the old ingredients
were discernible.
This was the fringe of Bigness's own sanctuary, and now Bibbs reached
the roaring holy of holies itself. The car must stop at every crossing
while the dark-garbed crowds, enveloped in maelstroms of dust, hurried
before it. Magnificent new buildings, already dingy, loomed hundreds of
feet above him; newer ones, more magnificent, were rising beside them,
rising higher; old buildings were coming down; middle-aged buildings
were coming down; the streets were laid open to their entrails and men
worked underground between palisades, and overhead in metal cobwebs
like spiders in the sky. Trolley-cars and long interurban cars, built to
split the wind like torpedo-boats, clanged and shrieked their way
round swarming corners; motor-cars of every kind and shape known to
man babbled frightful warnings and frantic demands; hospital ambulances
clamored wildly for passage; steam-whistles signaled the swinging of
titanic tentacle and claw; riveters rattled like machine-guns; the
ground shook to the thunder of gigantic trucks; and the conglomerate
sound of it all was the sound of earthquake playing accompaniments for
battle and sudden death. On one of the new steel buildings no work
was being done that afternoon. The building had killed a man in the
morning--and the steel-workers always stop for the day when that
“happens.”
And in the hurrying crowds, swirling and sifting through the
brobdingnagian camp of iron and steel, one saw the camp-followers and
the pagan women--there would be work to-day and dancing to-night. For
the Puritan's dry voice is but the crackling of a leaf underfoot in the
rush and roar of the coming of the new Egypt.
Bibbs was on time. He knew it must be “to the minute” or his father
would consider it an outrage; and the big chronometer in Sheridan's
office marked four precisely when Bibbs walked in. Coincidentally with
his entrance five people who had been at work in the office, under
Sheridan's direction, walked out. They departed upon no visible or
audible suggestion, and with a promptness that seemed ominous to
the new-comer. As the massive door clicked softly behind the elderly
stenographer, the last of the procession, Bibbs had a feeling that
they all understood that he was a failure as a great man's son, a
disappointment, the “queer one” of the family, and that he had been
summoned to judgment--a well-founded impression, for that was exactly
what they understood.
“Sit down,” said Sheridan.
It is frequently an advantage for deans, school-masters, and worried
fathers to place delinquents in the sitting-posture. Bibbs sat.
Sheridan, standing, gazed enigmatically upon his son for a period of
silence, then walked slowly to a window and stood looking out of it, his
big hands, loosely hooked together by the thumbs, behind his back. They
were soiled, as were all other hands down-town, except such as might be
still damp from a basin.
“Well, Bibbs,” he said at last, not altering his attitude, “do you know
what I'm goin' to do with you?”
Bibbs, leaning back in his chair, fixed his eyes contemplatively upon
the ceiling. “I heard you tell Jim,” he began, in his slow way. “You
said you'd send him to the machine-shop with me if he didn't propose to
Miss Vertrees. So I suppose that must be your plan for me. But--”
“But what?” said Sheridan, irritably, as the son paused.
“Isn't there somebody you'd let ME propose to?”
That brought his father sharply round to face him. “You beat the devil!
Bibbs, what IS the matter with you? Why can't you be like anybody else?”
“Liver, maybe,” said Bibbs, gently.
“Boh! Even ole Doc Gurney says there's nothin' wrong with you
organically. No. You're a dreamer, Bibbs; that's what's the matter,
and that's ALL the matter. Oh, not one o' these BIG dreamers that put
through the big deals! No, sir! You're the kind o' dreamer that just
sets out on the back fence and thinks about how much trouble there must
be in the world! That ain't the kind that builds the bridges, Bibbs;
it's the kind that borrows fifteen cents from his wife's uncle's
brother-in-law to get ten cent's worth o' plug tobacco and a nickel's
worth o' quinine!”
He put the finishing touch on this etching with a snort, and turned
again to the window.
“Look out there!” he bade his son. “Look out o' that window! Look at the
life and energy down there! I should think ANY young man's blood would
tingle to get into it and be part of it. Look at the big things young
men are doin' in this town!” He swung about, coming to the mahogany desk
in the middle of the room. “Look at what I was doin' at your age! Look
at what your own brothers are doin'! Look at Roscoe! Yes, and look
at Jim! I made Jim president o' the Sheridan Realty Company last
New-Year's, with charge of every inch o' ground and every brick and
every shingle and stick o' wood we own; and it's an example to any young
man--or ole man, either--the way he took ahold of it. Last July we found
out we wanted two more big warehouses at the Pump Works--wanted 'em
quick. Contractors said it couldn't be done; said nine or ten months
at the soonest; couldn't see it any other way. What'd Jim do? Took the
contract himself; found a fellow with a new cement and concrete process;
kept men on the job night and day, and stayed on it night and day
himself--and, by George! we begin to USE them warehouses next week! Four
months and a half, and every inch fireproof! I tell you Jim's one o'
these fellers that make miracles happen! Now, I don't say every young
man can be like Jim, because there's mighty few got his ability, but
every young man can go in and do his share. This town is God's own
country, and there's opportunity for anybody with a pound of energy and
an ounce o' gumption. I tell you these young business men I watch just
do my heart good! THEY don't set around on the back fence--no, sir! They
take enough exercise to keep their health; and they go to a baseball
game once or twice a week in summer, maybe, and they're raisin' nice
families, with sons to take their places sometime and carry on the
work--because the work's got to go ON! They're puttin' their life-blood
into it, I tell you, and that's why we're gettin' bigger every minute,
and why THEY'RE gettin' bigger, and why it's all goin' to keep ON
gettin' bigger!”
He slapped the desk resoundingly with his open palm, and then, observing
that Bibbs remained in the same impassive attitude, with his eyes still
fixed upon the ceiling in a contemplation somewhat plaintive, Sheridan
was impelled to groan. “Oh, Lord!” he said. “This is the way you always
were. I don't believe you understood a darn word I been sayin'! You
don't LOOK as if you did. By George! it's discouraging!”
“I don't understand about getting--about getting bigger,” said Bibbs,
bringing his gaze down to look at his father placatively. “I don't see
just why--”
“WHAT?” Sheridan leaned forward, resting his hands upon the desk and
staring across it incredulously at his son.
“I don't understand--exactly--what you want it all bigger for?”
“Great God!” shouted Sheridan, and struck the desk a blow with his
clenched fist. “A son of mine asks me that! You go out and ask the
poorest day-laborer you can find! Ask him that question--”
“I did once,” Bibbs interrupted; “when I was in the machine-shop. I--”
“Wha'd he say?”
“He said, 'Oh, hell!'” answered Bibbs, mildly.
“Yes, I reckon he would!” Sheridan swung away from the desk. “I reckon
he certainly would! And I got plenty sympathy with him right now,
myself!”
“It's the same answer, then?” Bibbs's voice was serious, almost
tremulous.
“Damnation!” Sheridan roared. “Did you ever hear the word Prosperity,
you ninny? Did you ever hear the word Ambition? Did you ever hear the
word PROGRESS?”
He flung himself into a chair after the outburst, his big chest surging,
his throat tumultuous with gutteral incoherences. “Now then,” he said,
huskily, when the anguish had somewhat abated, “what do you want to do?”
“Sir?”
“What do you WANT to do, I said.”
Taken by surprise, Bibbs stammered. “What--what do--I--what--”
“If I'd let you do exactly what you had the whim for, what would you
do?”
Bibbs looked startled; then timidity overwhelmed him--a profound
shyness. He bent his head and fixed his lowered eyes upon the toe of his
shoe, which he moved to and fro upon the rug, like a culprit called to
the desk in school.
“What would you do? Loaf?”
“No, sir.” Bibbs's voice was almost inaudible, and what little sound it
made was unquestionably a guilty sound. “I suppose I'd--I'd--”
“Well?”
“I suppose I'd try to--to write.”
“Write what?”
“Nothing important--just poems and essays, perhaps.”
“That all?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I see,” said his father, breathing quickly with the restraint he was
putting upon himself. “That is, you want to write, but you don't want to
write anything of any account.”
“You think--”
Sheridan got up again. “I take my hat off to the man that can write
a good ad,” he said, emphatically. “The best writin' talent in this
country is right spang in the ad business to-day. You buy a magazine for
good writin'--look on the back of it! Let me tell you I pay money for
that kind o' writin'. Maybe you think it's easy. Just try it! I've tried
it, and I can't do it. I tell you an ad's got to be written so it makes
people do the hardest thing in this world to GET 'em to do: it's got to
make 'em give up their MONEY! You talk about 'poems and essays.' I tell
you when it comes to the actual skill o' puttin' words together so as to
make things HAPPEN, R. T. Bloss, right here in this city, knows more in
a minute than George Waldo Emerson ever knew in his whole life!”
“You--you may be--” Bibbs said, indistinctly, the last word smothered in
a cough.
“Of COURSE I'm right! And if it ain't just like you to want to take up
with the most out-o'-date kind o' writin' there is! 'Poems and essays'!
My Lord, Bibbs, that's WOMEN'S work! You can't pick up a newspaper
without havin' to see where Mrs. Rumskididle read a paper on 'Jane
Eyre,' or 'East Lynne,' at the God-Knows-What Club. And 'poetry'! Why,
look at Edith! I expect that poem o' hers would set a pretty high-water
mark for you, young man, and it's the only one she's ever managed to
write in her whole LIFE! When I wanted her to go on and write some more
she said it took too much time. Said it took months and months. And
Edith's a smart girl; she's got more energy in her little finger than
you ever give me a chance to see in your whole body, Bibbs. Now look
at the facts: say she could turn out four or five poems a year and you
could turn out maybe two. That medal she got was worth about fifteen
dollars, so there's your income--thirty dollars a year! That's a fine
success to make of your life! I'm not sayin' a word against poetry. I
wouldn't take ten thousand dollars right now for that poem of Edith's;
and poetry's all right enough in its place--but you leave it to the
girls. A man's got to do a man's work in this world!”
He seated himself in a chair at his son's side and, leaning over, tapped
Bibbs confidentially on the knee. “This city's got the greatest future
in America, and if my sons behave right by me and by themselves they're
goin' to have a mighty fair share of it--a mighty fair share. I love
this town. It's God's own footstool, and it's made money for me every
day right along, I don't know how many years. I love it like I do my own
business, and I'd fight for it as quick as I'd fight for my own family.
It's a beautiful town. Look at our wholesale district; look at any
district you want to; look at the park system we're puttin' through,
and the boulevards and the public statuary. And she grows. God! how she
grows!” He had become intensely grave; he spoke with solemnity. “Now,
Bibbs, I can't take any of it--nor any gold or silver nor buildings nor
bonds--away with me in my shroud when I have to go. But I want to leave
my share in it to my boys. I've worked for it; I've been a builder and
a maker; and two blades of grass have grown where one grew before,
whenever I laid my hand on the ground and willed 'em to grow. I've built
big, and I want the buildin' to go on. And when my last hour comes I
want to know that my boys are ready to take charge; that they're fit
to take charge and go ON with it. Bibbs, when that hour comes I want
to know that my boys are big men, ready and fit to take hold of big things.
Bibbs, when I'm up above I want to know that the big share I've made
mine, here below, is growin' bigger and bigger in the charge of my
boys.”
He leaned back, deeply moved. “There!” he said, huskily. “I've never
spoken more what was in my heart in my life. I do it because I want you
to understand--and not think me a mean father. I never had to talk that
way to Jim and Roscoe. They understood without any talk, Bibbs.”
“I see,” said Bibbs. “At least I think I do. But--”
“Wait a minute!” Sheridan raised his hand. “If you see the least bit
in the world, then you understand how it feels to me to have my son set
here and talk about 'poems and essays' and such-like fooleries. And you
must understand, too, what it meant to start one o' my boys and have
him come back on me the way you did, and have to be sent to a sanitarium
because he couldn't stand work. Now, let's get right down to it, Bibbs.
I've had a whole lot o' talk with ole Doc Gurney about you, one time
another, and I reckon I understand your case just about as well as he
does, anyway! Now here, I'll be frank with you. I started you in harder
than what I did the other boys, and that was for your own good, because
I saw you needed to be shook up more'n they did. You were always kind of
moody and mopish--and you needed work that'd keep you on the jump. Now,
why did it make you sick instead of brace you up and make a man of you
the way it ought of done? I pinned ole Gurney down to it. I says, 'Look
here, ain't it really because he just plain hated it?' 'Yes,' he says,
'that's it. If he'd enjoyed it, it wouldn't 'a' hurt him. He loathes it,
and that affects his nervous system. The more he tries it, the more he
hates it; and the more he hates it, the more injury it does him.' That
ain't quite his words, but it's what he meant. And that's about the way
it is.”
“Yes,” said Bibbs, “that's about the way it is.”
“Well, then, I reckon it's up to me not only to make you do it, but to
make you like it!”
Bibbs shivered. And he turned upon his father a look that was almost
ghostly. “I can't,” he said, in a low voice. “I can't.”
“Can't go back to the shop?”
“No. Can't like it. I can't.”
Sheridan jumped up, his patience gone. To his own view, he had reasoned
exhaustively, had explained fully and had pleaded more than a father
should, only to be met in the end with the unreasoning and mysterious
stubbornness which had been Bibbs's baffling characteristic from
childhood. “By George, you will!” he cried. “You'll go back there and
you'll like it! Gurney says it won't hurt you if you like it, and he
says it'll kill you if you go back and hate it; so it looks as if it
was about up to you not to hate it. Well, Gurney's a fool! Hatin' work
doesn't kill anybody; and this isn't goin' to kill you, whether you hate
it or not. I've never made a mistake in a serious matter in my life,
and it wasn't a mistake my sendin' you there in the first place. And
I'm goin' to prove it--I'm goin' to send you back there and vindicate my
judgment. Gurney says it's all 'mental attitude.' Well, you're goin'
to learn the right one! He says in a couple more months this fool thing
that's been the matter with you'll be disappeared completely and you'll
be back in as good or better condition than you were before you ever
went into the shop. And right then is when you begin over--right in that
same shop! Nobody can call me a hard man or a mean father. I do the best
I can for my chuldern, and I take full responsibility for bringin' my
sons up to be men. Now, so far, I've failed with you. But I'm not goin'
to keep ON failin'. I never tackled a job YET I didn't put through, and
I'm not goin' to begin with my own son. I'm goin' to make a MAN of you.
By God! I am!”
Bibbs rose and went slowly to the door, where he turned. “You say you
give me a couple of months?” he said.
Sheridan pushed a bell-button on his desk. “Gurney said two months more
would put you back where you were. You go home and begin to get yourself
in the right 'mental attitude' before those two months are up! Good-by!”
“Good-by, sir,” said Bibbs, meekly.