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

exactly, though the Lord knows you’ve laid down on me enough. You certainly have!” Sheridan was baffled. This was not what he wished to say, but his words were unmanageable; he found himself unable to control them, and his querulous abuse went on in spite of him. “I can’t say I expect much of you⁠—not from the way you always been, up to now⁠—unless you turn over a new leaf, and I don’t see any encouragement to think you’re goin’ to do that! If you go down there and show a spark o’ real git-up, I reckon the whole office’ll fall in a faint. But if you’re ever goin’ to show any, you better begin right at the beginning and begin to show it tomorrow.”

“Yes⁠—I’ll try.”

“You better, if it’s in you!” Sheridan was sheerly nonplussed. He had always been able to say whatever he wished to say, but his tongue seemed bewitched. He had come to tell Bibbs about Mary’s letter, and to his own angry astonishment he found it impossible to do anything except to scold like a drudge-driver. “You better come down there with your mind made up to hustle harder than the hardest workin’-man that’s under you, or you’ll not get on very good with me, I tell you! The way to get ahead⁠—and you better set it down in your books⁠—the way to get ahead is to do ten times the work of the hardest worker that works for you. But you don’t know what work is, yet. All you’ve ever done was just stand around and feed a machine a child could handle, and then come home and take a bath and go callin’. I tell you you’re up against a mighty different proposition now, and if you’re worth your salt⁠—and you never showed any signs of it yet⁠—not any signs that stuck out enough to bang somebody on the head and make ’em sit up and take notice⁠—well, I want to say, right here and now⁠—and you better listen, because I want to say just what I do say. I say⁠—”

He meandered to a full stop. His mouth hung open, and his mind was a hopeless blank.

Bibbs looked up patiently⁠—an old, old look. “Yes, father; I’m listening.”

“That’s all,” said Sheridan, frowning heavily. “That’s all I came to say, and you better see’t you remember it!”

He shook his head warningly, and went out, closing the door behind him with a crash. However, no sound of footsteps indicated his departure. He stopped just outside the door, and stood there a minute or more. Then abruptly he turned the knob and exhibited to his son a forehead liberally covered with perspiration.

“Look here,” he said, crossly. “That girl over yonder wrote Jim a letter⁠—”

“I know,” said Bibbs. “She told me.”

“Well, I thought you needn’t feel so much upset about it⁠—” The door closed on his voice as he withdrew, but the conclusion of the sentence was nevertheless audible⁠—“if you knew she wouldn’t have Jim, either.”

And he stamped his way downstairs to tell his wife to quit her frettin’ and not bother him with any more fool’s errands. She was about to inquire what Bibbs said, but after a second thought she decided not to speak at all. She merely murmured a wordless assent, and verbal communication was given over between them for the rest of that afternoon.

Bibbs and his father were gone when Mrs. Sheridan woke, the next morning, and she had a dreary day. She missed Edith woefully, and she worried about what might be taking place in the Sheridan Building. She felt that everything depended on how Bibbs “took hold,” and upon her husband’s return in the evening she seized upon the first opportunity to ask him how things had gone. He was noncommittal. What could anybody tell by the first day? He’d seen plenty go at things well enough right at the start and then blow up. Pretty near anybody could show up fair the first day or so. There was a big job ahead. This material, such as it was⁠—Bibbs, in fact⁠—had to be broken in to handling the work Roscoe had done; and then, at least as an overseer, he must take Jim’s position in the Realty Company as well. He told her to ask him again in a month.

But during the course of dinner she gathered from some disjointed remarks of his that he and Bibbs had lunched together at the small restaurant where it had been Sheridan’s custom to lunch with Jim, and she took this to be an encouraging sign. Bibbs went to his room as soon as they left the table, and her husband was not communicative after reading his paper.

She became an anxious spectator of Bibbs’s progress as a man of business, although it was a progress she could glimpse but dimly and only in the evening, through his remarks and his father’s at dinner. Usually Bibbs was silent, except when directly addressed, but on the first evening of the third week of his new career he offered an opinion which had apparently been the subject of previous argument.

“I’d like you to understand just what I meant about those storage-rooms, father,” he said, as Jackson placed his coffee before him. “Abercrombie agreed with me, but you wouldn’t listen to him.”

“You can talk, if you want to, and I’ll listen,” Sheridan returned, “but you can’t show me that Jim ever took up with a bad thing. The roof fell because it hadn’t had time to settle and on account of weather conditions. I want that building put just the way Jim planned it.”

“You can’t have it,” said Bibbs. “You can’t, because Jim planned for the building to stand up, and it won’t do it. The other one⁠—the one that didn’t fall⁠—is so shot with cracks we haven’t dared use it for storage. It won’t stand weight. There’s only one thing to do: get both buildings down as quickly as we can, and build over. Brick’s the best and cheapest in