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

It was gray stone, with long roofs of thick green slate. An architect who loved the milder “Gothic motives” had built what he liked: it was to be seen at once that he had been left unhampered, and he had wrought a picture out of his head into a noble and exultant reality. At the same time a landscape-designer had played so good a second, with ready-made accessories of screen, approach and vista, that already whatever look of newness remained upon the place was to its advantage, as showing at least one thing yet clean under the grimy sky. For, though the smoke was thinner in this direction, and at this long distance from the heart of the town, it was not absent, and under tutelage of wind and weather could be malignant even here, where cows had wandered in the meadows and corn had been growing not ten years gone.

Altogether, the New House was a success. It was one of those architects’ successes which leave the owners veiled in privacy; it revealed nothing of the people who lived in it save that they were rich. There are houses that cannot be detached from their own people without protesting: every inch of mortar seems to mourn the separation, and such a house⁠—no matter what be done to it⁠—is ever murmurous with regret, whispering the old name sadly to itself unceasingly. But the New House was of a kind to change hands without emotion. In our swelling cities, great places of its type are useful as financial gauges of the business tides; rich families, one after another, take title and occupy such houses as fortunes rise and fall⁠—they mark the high tide. It was impossible to imagine a child’s toy wagon left upon a walk or driveway of the New House, and yet it was⁠—as Bibbs rightly called it⁠—“beautiful.”

What the architect thought of the Golfo di Napoli, which hung in its vast gold revel of rococo frame against the gray wood of the hall, is to be conjectured⁠—perhaps he had not seen it.

“Edith, did you say only eleven feet?” Bibbs panted, staring at it, as the white-jacketed twin of a Pullman porter helped him to get out of his overcoat.

“Eleven without the frame,” she explained. “It’s splendid, don’t you think? It lightens things up so. The hall was kind of gloomy before.”

“No gloom now!” said Bibbs.

“This statue in the corner is pretty, too,” she remarked. “Mamma and I bought that.” And Bibbs turned at her direction to behold, amid a grove of tubbed palms, a life-size, black-bearded Moor, of a plastic composition painted with unappeasable gloss and brilliancy. Upon his chocolate head he wore a gold turban; in his hand he held a gold-tipped spear; and for the rest, he was red and yellow and black and silver.

“Hallelujah!” was the sole comment of the returned wanderer, and Edith, saying she would “find mamma,” left him blinking at the Moor. Presently, after she had disappeared, he turned to the colored man who stood waiting, Bibbs’s traveling-bag in his hand. “What do you think of it?” Bibbs asked, solemnly.

“Gran’!” replied the servitor. “She mighty hard to dus’. Dus’ git in all ’em wrinkles. Yessuh, she mighty hard to dus’.”

“I expect she must be,” said Bibbs, his glance returning reflectively to the black bull beard for a moment. “Is there a place anywhere I could lie down?”

“Yessuh. We got one nem spare rooms all fix up fo’ you, suh. Right up staihs, suh. Nice room.”

He led the way, and Bibbs followed slowly, stopping at intervals to rest, and noting a heavy increase in the staff of service since the exodus from the “old” house. Maids and scrubwomen were at work under the patently nominal direction of another Pullman porter, who was profoundly enjoying his own affectation of being harassed with care.

“Ev’ything got look spick an’ span fo’ the big doin’s tonight,” Bibbs’s guide explained, chuckling. “Yessuh, we got big doin’s tonight! Big doin’s!”

The room to which he conducted his lagging charge was furnished in every particular like a room in a new hotel; and Bibbs found it pleasant⁠—though, indeed, any room with a good bed would have seemed pleasant to him after his journey. He stretched himself flat immediately, and having replied “Not now” to the attendant’s offer to unpack the bag, closed his eyes wearily.

White-jacket, racially sympathetic, lowered the window-shades and made an exit on tiptoe, encountering the other white-jacket⁠—the harassed overseer⁠—in the hall without. Said the emerging one: “He mighty shaky, Mist’ Jackson. Drop right down an’ shet his eyes. Eyelids all black. Rich folks gotta go same as anybody else. Anybody ast me if I change ’ith ’at ole boy⁠—No, suh! Le’m keep ’is money; I keep my black skin an’ keep out the ground!”

Mr. Jackson expressed the same preference. “Yessuh, he look tuh me like somebody awready laid out,” he concluded. And upon the stairway landing, near by, two old women, on all-fours at their work, were likewise pessimistic.

“Hech!” said one, lamenting in a whisper. “It give me a turn to see him go by⁠—white as wax an’ bony as a dead fish! Mrs. Cronin, tell me: d’it make ye kind o’ sick to look at um?”

“Sick? No more than the face of a blessed angel already in heaven!”

“Well,” said the other, “I’d a b’y o’ me own come home t’ die once⁠—” She fell silent at a rustling of skirts in the corridor above them.

It was Mrs. Sheridan hurrying to greet her son.

She was one of those fat, pink people who fade and contract with age like drying fruit; and her outside was a true portrait of her. Her husband and her daughter had long ago absorbed her. What intelligence she had was given almost wholly to comprehending and serving those two, and except in the presence of one of them she was nearly always absentminded. Edith lived all day with her mother, as daughters do; and Sheridan so held his wife to her