The Turmoil, Booth Tarkington [best english novels for beginners .txt] 📗

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 woodpile 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 percent 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,