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

and stood before him. “I’m cured, father,” he said. “When do I go back to the shop? I’m ready.”

The desolate and grim old man did not relax. “I was sittin’ up to give you a last chance to say something like that. I reckon it’s about time! I just wanted to see if you’d have manhood enough not to make me take you over there by the collar. Last night I made up my mind I’d give you just one more day. Well, you got to it before I did⁠—pretty close to the eleventh hour! All right. Start in tomorrow. It’s the first o’ the month. Think you can get up in time?”

“Six o’clock,” Bibbs responded, briskly. “And I want to tell you⁠—I’m going in a cheerful spirit. As you said, I’ll go and I’ll like it!”

“That’s your lookout!” his father grunted. “They’ll put you back on the clippin’-machine. You get nine dollars a week.”

“More than I’m worth, too,” said Bibbs, cheerily. “That reminds me, I didn’t mean you by ‘Midas’ in that nonsense I’d been writing. I meant⁠—”

“Makes a hell of a lot o’ difference what you meant!”

“I just wanted you to know. Good night, father.”

“G’night!”

The sound of the young man’s footsteps ascending the stairs became inaudible, and the house was quiet. But presently, as Sheridan sat staring angrily at the fire, the shuffling of a pair of slippers could be heard descending, and Mrs. Sheridan made her appearance, her oblique expression and the state of her toilette being those of a person who, after trying unsuccessfully to sleep on one side, has got up to look for burglars.

“Papa!” she exclaimed, drowsily. “Why’n’t you go to bed? It must be goin’ on ’leven o’clock!”

She yawned, and seated herself near him, stretching out her hands to the fire. “What’s the matter?” she asked, sleep and anxiety striving sluggishly with each other in her voice. “I knew you were worried all dinnertime. You got something new on your mind besides Jim’s bein’ taken away like he was. What’s worryin’ you now, papa?”

“Nothin’.”

She jeered feebly. “N’ tell me that! You sat up to see Bibbs, didn’t you?”

“He starts in at the shop again tomorrow morning,” said Sheridan.

“Just the same as he did before?”

“Just pre-cisely!”

“How⁠—how long you goin’ to keep him at it, papa?” she asked, timidly.

“Until he knows something!” The unhappy man struck his palms together, then got to his feet and began to pace the room, as was his wont when he talked. “He’ll go back to the machine he couldn’t learn to tend properly in the six months he was there, and he’ll stick to it till he does learn it! Do you suppose that lummix ever asked himself why I want him to learn it? No! And I ain’t a-goin’ to tell him, either! When he went there I had ’em set him on the simplest machine we got⁠—and he stuck there! How much prospect would there be of his learnin’ to run the whole business if he can’t run the easiest machine in it? I sent him there to make him thorough. And what happened? He didn’t like it! That boy’s whole life, there’s been a settin’ up o’ something mulish that’s against everything I want him to do. I don’t know what it is, but it’s got to be worked out of him. Now, labor ain’t any more a simple question than what it was when we were young. My idea is that, outside o’ union troubles, the man that can manage workin’-men is the man that’s been one himself. Well, I set Bibbs to learn the men and to learn the business, and he set himself to balk on the first job! That’s what he did, and the balk’s lasted close on to three years. If he balks again I’m just done with him! Sometimes I feel like I was pretty near done with everything, anyhow!”

“I knew there was something else,” said Mrs. Sheridan, blinking over a yawn. “You better let it go till tomorrow and get to bed now⁠—’less you’ll tell me?”

“Suppose something happened to Roscoe,” he said. “Then what’d I have to look forward to? Then what could I depend on to hold things together? A lummix! A lummix that hasn’t learned how to push a strip o’ zinc along a groove!”

“Roscoe?” she yawned. “You needn’t worry about Roscoe, papa. He’s the strongest child we had. I never did know anybody keep better health than he does. I don’t believe he’s even had a cold in five years. You better go up to bed, papa.”

“Suppose something did happen to him, though. You don’t know what it means, keepin’ property together these days⁠—just keepin’ it alive, let alone makin’ it grow the way I do. I’ve seen too many estates hacked away in chunks, big and little. I tell you when a man dies the wolves come out o’ the woods, pack after pack, to see what they can tear off for themselves; and if that dead man’s chuldern ain’t on the job, night and day, everything he built’ll get carried off. Carried off? I’ve seen a big fortune behave like an ash-barrel in a cyclone⁠—there wasn’t even a dust-heap left to tell where it stood! I’ve seen it, time and again. My Lord! when I think o’ such things comin’ to me! It don’t seem like I deserved it⁠—no man ever tried harder to raise his boys right than I have. I planned and planned and planned how to bring ’em up to be guards to drive the wolves off, and how to be builders to build, and build bigger. I tell you this business life is no fool’s job nowadays⁠—a man’s got to have eyes in the back of his head. You hear talk, sometimes, ’d make you think the millennium had come⁠—but right the next breath you’ll hear somebody hollerin’ about ‘the great unrest.’ You bet there’s a ‘great unrest’! There ain’t any man alive smart enough to see what it’s goin’ to do