The Turmoil, A Novel
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Booth Tarkington >> The Turmoil, A Novel
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20 The Turmoil. A novel by Booth Tarkington
1915.
To Laurel.
There is a midland city in the heart of fair, open country, a dirty and
wonderful city nesting dingily in the fog of its own smoke. The stranger
must feel the dirt before he feels the wonder, for the dirt will be upon him
instantly. It will be upon him and within him, since he must breathe it, and
he may care for no further proof that wealth is here better loved than
cleanliness; but whether he cares or not, the negligently tended streets
incessantly press home the point, and so do the flecked and grimy citizens. At
a breeze he must smother in the whirlpools of dust, and if he should decline
at any time to inhale the smoke he has the meager alternative of suicide.
The smoke is like the bad breath of a giant panting for more and more riches.
He gets them and pants the fiercer, smelling and swelling prodigiously. He
has a voice, a hoarse voice, hot and rapacious trained to one tune: "Wealth!
I will get Wealth I will make Wealth! I will sell Wealth for more Wealth! My
house shall be dirty, my garment shall be dirty, and I will foul my neighbor
so that he cannot be clean--but I will get Wealth! There shall be no clean
thing about me: my wife shall be dirty and my child shall be dirty, but I
will get Wealth!" And yet it is not wealth that he is so greedy for: what the
giant really wants is hasty riches. To get these he squanders wealth upon the
four winds, for wealth is in the smoke.
Not so long ago as a generation, there was no panting giant here, no heaving,
grimy city; there was but a pleasant big town of neighborly people who had
understanding of one another, being, on the whole, much of the same type. It
was a leisurely and kindly place--"homelike," it was called--and when the
visitor had been taken through the State Asylum for the Insane and made to
appreciate the view of the cemetery from a little hill, his host's duty as
Baedeker was done. The good burghers were given to jogging comfortably about
in phaetons or in surreys for a family drive on Sunday. No one was very rich;
few were very poor; the air was clean, and there was time to live.
But there was a spirit abroad in the land, and it was strong here as
elsewhere--a spirit that had moved in the depths of the American soil and
labored there, sweating, till it stirred the surface, rove the mountains, and
emerged, tangible and monstrous, the god of all good American hearts--
Bigness. And that god wrought the panting giant.
In the souls of the burghers there had always been the profound longing for
size. Year by year the longing increased until it became an accumulated
force: We must Grow! We must be Big! We must be Bigger! Bigness means
Money! And the thing began to happen; their longing became a mighty Will. We
must be Bigger! Bigger! Bigger! Get people here! Coax them here! Bribe
them! Swindle them into coming, if you must, but get them! Shout them into
coming! Deafen them into coming! Any kind of people; all kinds of people!
We must be Bigger! Blow! Boost! Brag! Kill the fault-finder! Scream and
bellow to the Most High: Bigness is patriotism and honor! Bigness is love and
life and happiness! Bigness is Money! We want Bigness!
They got it. From all the states the people came; thinly at first, and
slowly, but faster and faster in thicker and thicker swarms as the quick years
went by. White people came, and black people and brown people and yellow
people; the negroes came from the South by the thousands and thousands,
multiplying by other thousands and thousands faster than they could die. From
the four quarters of the earth the people came, the broken and the unbroken,
the tame and the wild--Germans, Irish, Italians, Hungarians, Scotch, Welsh,
English, French, Swiss, Swedes, Norwegians, Greeks, Poles, Russian Jews,
Dalmatians, Armenians, Rumanians, Servians, Persians, Syrians, Japanese,
Chinese, Turks, and every hybrid that these could propagate. And if there
were no Eskimos nor Patagonians, what other human strain that earth might
furnish failed to swim and bubble in this crucible?
With Bigness came the new machinery and the rush; the streets began to roar
and rattle, the houses to tremble; the pavements were worn under the tread of
hurrying multitudes. The old, leisurely, quizzical look of the faces was lost
in something harder and warier; and a cockney type began to emerge
discernibly--a cynical young mongrel, barbaric of feature, muscular and
cunning; dressed in good fabrics fashioned apparently in imitation of the
sketches drawn by newspaper comedians. The female of his kind came with him
--a pale girl, shoddy and a little rouged; and they communicated in a nasal
argot, mainly insolences and elisions. Nay, the common speech of the people
showed change: in place of the old midland vernacular, irregular but clean,
and not unwholesomely drawling, a jerky dialect of coined metaphors began to
be heard, held together by GUNNAS and GOTTAS and much fostered by the public
journals.
The city piled itself high in the center, tower on tower for a nucleus, and
spread itself out over the plain, mile after mile; and in its vitals, like
benevolent bacilli contending with malevolent in the body of a man, missions
and refuges offered what resistance they might to the saloons and all the
hells that cities house and shelter. Temptation and ruin were ready
commodities on the market for purchase by the venturesome; highwaymen walked
the streets at night and sometimes killed; snatching thieves were busy
everywhere in the dusk; while house-breakers were a common apprehension and
frequent reality. Life itself was somewhat safer from intentional destruction
than it was in medieval Rome during a faction war--though the Roman murderer
was more like to pay for his deed--but death or mutilation beneath the wheels
lay in ambush at every crossing.
The politicians let the people make all the laws they liked; it did not matter
much, and the taxes went up, which is good for politicians. Law-making was a
pastime of the people; nothing pleased them more. Singular fermentation of
their humor, they even had laws forbidding dangerous speed. More marvelous
still, they had a law forbidding smoke! They forbade chimneys to smoke and
they forbade cigarettes to smoke. They made laws for all things and forgot
them immediately; though sometimes they would remember after a while, and
hurry to make new laws that the old laws should be enforced--and then forget
both new and old. Wherever enforcement threatened Money or Votes --or
wherever it was too much to bother--it became a joke. Influence was the law.
So the place grew. And it grew strong. Straightway when he came, each man
fell to the same worship:
Give me of thyself, O Bigness:
Power to get more power!
Riches to get more riches!
Give me of thy sweat that I may sweat more!
Give me Bigness to get more Bigness to myself,
O Bigness, for Thine is the Power and the Glory!
And there is no end but Bigness, ever and for ever!
The Sheridan Building was the biggest skyscraper; the Sheridan Trust Company
was the biggest of its kind, and Sheridan himself had been the biggest builder
and breaker and truster and buster under the smoke. He had come from a
country cross-roads, at the beginning of the growth, and he had gone up and
down in the booms and relapses of that period; but each time he went down he
rebounded a little higher, until finally, after a year of overwork and
anxiety--the latter not decreased by a chance, remote but possible, of
recuperation from the former in the penitentiary--he found himself on top,
with solid substance under his feet; and thereafter "played it safe." But his
hunger to get was unabated, for it was in the very bones of him and grew
fiercer.
He was the city incarnate. He loved it, calling it God's country, as he
called the smoke Prosperity, breathing the dingy cloud with relish. And when
soot fell upon his cuff he chuckled; he could have kissed it. "It's good! It's
good!" he said, and smacked his lips in gusto. "Good, clean soot; it's our
life-blood, God bless it!" The smoke was one of his great enthusiasms; he
laughed at a committee of plaintive housewives who called to beg his aid
against it. "Smoke's what brings your husbands' money home on Saturday night,
"he told them, jovially. "Smoke may hurt your little shrubberies in the front
yard some, but it's the catarrhal climate and the adenoids that starts your
chuldern coughing. Smoke makes the climate better. Smoke means good health:
it makes the people wash more. They have to wash so much they wash off the
microbes. You go home and ask your husbands what smoke puts in their pockets
out o' the pay-roll--and you'll come around next time to get me to turn out
more smoke instead o' chokin' it off!"
It was Narcissism in him to love the city so well; he saw his reflection in
it; and, like it, he was grimy, big, careless, rich, strong, and unquenchably
optimistic. From the deepest of his inside all the way out he believed it was
the finest city in the world. "Finest" was his word. He thought of it as his
city as he thought of his family as his family; and just as profoundly
believed his city to be the finest city in the world, so did he believe his
family to be--in spite of his son Bibbs--the finest family in the world. As a
matter of fact, he knew nothing worth knowing about either.
Bibbs Sheridan was a musing sort of boy, poor in health, and considered the
failure--the "odd one"--of the family. Born during that most dangerous and
anxious of the early years, when the mother fretted and the father took his
chance, he was an ill-nourished baby, and grew meagerly, only lengthwise,
through a feeble childhood. At his christening he was committed for life to
"Bibbs" mainly through lack of imagination on his mother's part, for though it
was her maiden name, she had no strong affection for it; but it was "her turn"
to name the baby, and, as she explained later, she "couldn't think of anything
else she liked AT ALL!" She offered this explanation one day when 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
occassion 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, pheumonia, 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 wood-pile 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 per cent. 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, and R. T. Bloss said so,
too; and I guess he's a good enough literary judge for me-- turns out more
advertisin' liter'cher than any man in the city. I tell you she's smart!
Look at the way she worked me to get me to promise the New House--and I guess
you had your finger in that, too, mamma! This old shack's good enough for me,
but you and little Edie 'll have to have your way. I'll get behind her and
push her the same as I will Jim and Roscoe. I tell you I'm mighty proud o'
them three chuldern! But Bibbs--" He paused, shaking his head. "Honest,
mamma, when I talk to men that got ALL their boys doin' well and worth their
salt, why, I have to keep my mind on Jim and Roscoe and forget about Bibbs."
Mrs. Sheridan tossed her head fretfully upon the pillow. "You did the best
you could, papa," she said, impatiently, "so come to bed and quit reproachin'
youself for it."
He glared at her indignantly. "Reproachin' myself!" he snorted. "I ain't
doin' anything of the kind! What in the name o' goodness would I want to
reproach myself for? And it wasn't the 'best I could,' either. It was the
best ANYBODY could! I was givin' him a chance to show what was in him and
make a man of himself--and here he goes and gets 'nervous dyspepsia' on me!"
He went to the old-fashioned gas-fixture, turned out the light, and muttered
his way morosely into bed.
"What?" said his wife, crossly, bothered by a subsequent mumbling.
"More like hook-worm, I said," he explained, speaking louder. "I don't know
what to do with him!"
Beginning at the beginning and learning from the ground up was a long course
for Bibbs at the sanitarium, with milk and "zwieback" as the basis of
instruction; and the months were many and tiresome before he was considered
near enough graduation to go for a walk leaning on a nurse and a cane. These
and subsequent months saw the planning, the building, and the completion of
the New House; and it was to that abode of Bigness that Bibbs was brought when
the cane, without the nurse, was found sufficient to his support.
Edith met him at the station. "Well, well, Bibbs!" she said, as he came
slowly through the gates, the last of all the travelers from that train. She
gave his hand a brisk little shake, averting her eyes after a quick glance at
him, and turning at once toward the passage to the street. "Do you think they
ought to 've let you come? You certainly don't look well!"
"But I certainly do look better," he returned, in a voice as slow as his gait;
a drawl that was a necessity, for when Bibbs tried to speak quickly he
stammered. "Up to about a month ago it took two people to see me. They had
to get me in a line between 'em!"
Edith did not turn her eyes directly toward him again, after her first quick
glance; and her expression, in spite of her, showed a faint, troubled
distaste, the look of a healthy person pressed by some obligation of business
to visit a "bad" ward in a hospital. She was nineteen, fair and slim, with
small, unequal features, but a prettiness of color and a brilliancy of eyes
that created a total impression close upon beauty. Her movements were eager
and restless: there was something about her, as kind old ladies say, that was
very sweet; and there was something that was hurried and breathless. This was
new to Bibbs; it was a perceptible change since he had last seen her, and he
bent upon her a steady, whimsical scrutiny as they stood at the curb, waiting
for an automobile across the street to disengage itself from the traffic.
"That's the new car," she said. "Everything's new. We've got four now,
besides Jim's. Roscoe's got two."
"Edith, you look--" he began, and paused.
"Oh, WE're all well," she said, briskly; and then, as if something in his tone
had caught her as significant, "Well, HOW do I look, Bibbs?"
"You look--" He paused again, taking in the full length of her--her trim
brown shoes, her scant, tapering, rough skirt, and her coat of brown and
green, her long green tippet and her mad little rough hat in the mad mode--
all suited to the October day.
"How do I look?" she insisted.
"You look," he answered, as his examination ended upon an incrusted watch of
platinum and enamel at her wrist, "you look--expensive!" That was a
substitute for what he intended to say, for her constraint and preoccupation,
manifested particularly in her keeping her direct glance away from him, did
not seem to grant the privilege of impulsive intimacies.
"I expect I am!" she laughed, and sidelong caught the direction of his glance.
"Of course I oughtn't to wear it in the daytime--it's an evening thing, for
the theater--by my day wrist-watch is out of gear. Bobby Lamhorn broke it
yesterday; he's a regular rowdy sometimes. Do you want Claus to help you in?"
"Oh no," said Bibbs. "I'm alive." And after a fit of panting subsequent to
his climbing into the car unaided, he added, "Of course, I have to TELL
people!"
"We only got your telegram this morning," she said, as they began to move
rapidly through the "wholesale district" neighboring the station. "Mother
said she'd hardly expected you this month."
"They seemed to be through with me up there in the country," he explained,
gently. "At least they said they were, and they wouldn't keep me any longer,
because so many really sick people wanted to get in. They told me to go home
--and I didn't have any place else to go. It 'll be all right, Edith; I'll
sit in the woodshed until after dark every day."
"Pshaw!" She laughed nervously. "Of course we're all of us glad to have you
back."
"Yes?" he said. "Father?"
"Of course! Didn't he write and tell you to come home?" She did not turn to
him with the question. All the while she rode with her face directly forward.
"No," he said; "father hasn't written."
She flushed a little. "I expect I ought to 've written sometime, or one of
the boys--"
"Oh no; that was all right."
"You can't think how busy we've all been this year, Bibbs. I often planned to
write--and then, just as I was going to, something would turn up. And I'm
sure it's been just the same way with Jim and Roscoe. Of course we knew mamma
was writing often and--"
"Of course!" he said, readily. "There's a chunk of coal fallen on your glove,
Edith. Better flick it off before it smears. My word! I'd almost forgotten
how sooty it is here."
"We've been having very bright weather this month--for us." She blew the
flake of soot into the air, seeming relieved.
He looked up at the dingy sky, wherein hung the disconsolate sun like a cold
tin pan nailed up in a smoke-house by some lunatic, for a decoration. "Yes,"
said Bibbs. "It's very gay." A few moments later, as they passed a corner,
"Aren't we going home?" he asked.
"Why, yes!" Did you want to go somewhere else first?"
"No. Your new driver's taking us out of the way, isn't he?"
"No. This is right. We're going straight home."
"But we've passed the corner. We always turned--"
"Good gracious!" she cried. "Didn't you know we'd moved? Didn't you know we
were in the New House?"
"Why, no!" said Bibbs. "Are you?"
"We've been there a month! Good gracious! Didn't you know--" She broke off,
flushing again, and then went on hastily: "Of course, mamma's never been so
busy in her life; we ALL haven't had time to do anything but keep on the hop.
Mamma couldn't even come to the station to-day. Papa's got some of his
business friends and people from around the OLD-house neighborhood coming
to-night for a big dinner and 'house-warming'--dreadful kind of people--but
mamma's got it all on her hands. She's never sat down a MINUTE; and if she
did, papa would have her up again before--"
"Of course," said Bibbs. "Do you like the new place, Edith?"
"I don't like some of the things father WOULD have in it, but it's the finest
house in town, and that ought to be good enough for me! Papa bought one thing
I like--a view of the Bay of Naples in oil that's perfectly beautiful; it's
the first thing you see as you come in the front hall, and it's eleven feet
long. But he would have that old fruit picture we had in the Murphy Street
house hung up in the new dining-room. You remember it--a table and a
watermelon sliced open, and a lot of rouged-looking apples and some shiny
lemons, with two dead prairie-chickens on a chair? He bought it at a
furniture-store years and years ago, and he claims it's a finer picture than
any they saw in the museums, that time he took mamma to Europe. But it's
horribly out of date to have those things in dining-rooms, and I caught Bobby
Lamhorn giggling at it; and Sibyl made fun of it, too, with Bobby, and then
told papa she agreed with him about its being such a fine thing, and said he
did just right to insist on having it where he wanted it. She makes me tired!
Sibyl!"
Edith's first constraint with her brother, amounting almost to awkwardness,
vanished with this theme, though she still kept her full gaze always to the
front, even in the extreme ardor of her denunciation of her sister-in-law.
"SIBYL!" she repeated, with such heat and vigor that the name seemed to strike
fire on her lips. "I'd like to know why Roscoe couldn't have married somebody
from HERE that would have done us some good! He could have got in with Bobby
Lamhorn years ago just as well as now, and Bobby 'd have introduced him to the
nicest girls in town, but instead of that he had to go and pick up this Sibyl
Rink! I met some awfully nice people from her town when mamma and I were at
Atlantic City, last spring, and not one had ever heard of the Rinks! Not even
HEARD of 'em!"
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